I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments on our EvoMedEd project.

If there is anything we can do to help connect you to our educational resources, please feel free to send me a note (pwhite@msu.edu). Be sure to check out our website at www.evo-ed.org

Thanks for stopping by... have a wonderful day!  :)

Hi Peter and Michigan State Team!

You are so right about evolution often being a challenging topic to learn -- the curricular materials that you describe sound like they are trying to combine the topic of evolution and also the needs for improving health.  The graphics that you have used in the video are also very informative and help to convey your narrative visually -- if the materials are similar to this, the visual aspects will also help students make connections.

The topics you identified as being available for teachers to use are great topics that will help to generate lots of conversation for learning.

Great video, Peter! And a very important project. I would add to Peter's comments that we often fail to heed Dobzhansky's sage advice that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Thus, as Peter points out, teaching evolution as just another topic among many in a survey course rather than as a unifying principle that ties together all areas of biology does not allow students to understand or appreciate the power of this branch of the life sciences to connect all other branches. 

Before I retired from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, I was involved with several projects that reinforce the kinds of learning that Evolutionary Medicine emphasizes. Although somewhat dated now, these resources can also be helpful for those who would like to think about evolution as a unifying theme in biology and evolutionary medicine as a pathway to emphasizing the centrality of evolution to all of biology:

From the National Academies (freely downloadable):

Thinking Evolutionarily: Evolution Education Across the Life Sciences: Summary of a Convocation. 2012.

Science, Evolution, and Creationism. 2008.

From the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History:

Teaching Evolution through Human Examples | The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program (si.edu)

Multiple education resources from the International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health:

ISEMPH - EvMedEd

Great video, Pete, and an introduction to an excellent resource!

As an evolutionary biologist, faculty developer, and educator, I see a strong need for biology curriculum that makes evolution "relevant and accessible". As you note, evolution is usually taught as a brief auxillary topic in science education, especially so in the medical and biomedical fields. But evolutionary thinking is fundamentally important for these fields. As Jay said in the previous comment, quoting Dobzhansky "nothing in biology makes sense except int he light of evolution". The med fields desperately need deeper evolutionary understanding to advance medical design and decision-making processes. Evolutionary understanding can inform everything from cancer research (as in your video) to decisions about how and why pharmaceutical release into ecosystems should be considered in drug design and addressed. 

Helping students make connections between evolutionary concepts and the rest of biological systems is a critical endeavor. 

I'm looking forward to digging into the resources that you're developing and sharing them with teachers and professors. Congratulations on relevant, engaging, and important work!

To echo and add to some of the previous comments, I agree that the primary goal of our project is twofold!

First, as Pete emphasizes, these cases aim to help undergraduate students understand how evolution is the unifying concept of the life sciences by presenting material in a way that is engaging and by covering topics they genuinely care about (e.g. health and disease).

Second, as others in the comments have noted, there is a clear need to further integrate evolutionary principles into medicine and public health. This all starts with educating future practitioners and policy makers, and many students on track for medical school often aren't introduced to the importance of eco-evolutionary perspectives for their field. Medical schools often cite an overcrowded curriculum as the reason for not teaching evolutionary medicine, so one solution is that we offer students these perspectives at the undergraduate level!

Pete, et al,

At the high school level, I use the Connected Biology Mendel's Peas and Deer Mice cases to augment my Evolution lessons.   The best thing I've heard this year was when one of my students declared, "Evolution is just Biology Common Sense".  The tumor example in your video underscores the logic and simplicity of the process -- Albeit, difficult at many levels, but (I think) the objective (in a high school setting) should really touch on the basics and the logic and the common sense -- and your approach does this expertly.  I have lobbied my administration in an attempt to get "Biology" renamed to "Evolution" -- because evolution is really what we are talking about from the first minute of class to the last -- I want Evolution and common sense Biology to be normalized.

Great video, Pete!!
It does appear that the undergraduate years are the "sweet spot" for bringing evolutionary medicine concepts into courses for those most interested in health and disease. When these students go on to teach in medical schools later in their careers, hopefully they will incorporate these concepts into their medical school course offerings!

Excellent.

It might be extremely beneficial to University students if Evolution spanned the firewall (Great Wall) erected between introductory "Organismal Biology" and "Cell & Molecular Biology" and this is a nice step in that direction.

Nice work.  This is a very compelling way for students to see the importance of evolution.  Shows what Randy Nesse meant in saying that teaching medicine without evolution is like teaching engineering without physics.

The animations in this video were excellent.  I would love the opportunity to retake my undergraduate biology course using these materials.  I would have a much better appreciation of evolution.  With that said, do you have any student stories to share with about implementing these materials thus far?  Have you been able to observe differences in conceptual understanding of evolution using this approach?  Do you think this approach could be used at the middle and high school level with some modifications based on grade levels.  This seems like a great opportunity to get students more engaged and excited about learning biology.  

Hi Pete! :) This new spin on EvoEd looks great, love the human connection. Will these materials be appropriate (or relatively adaptable) for AP Biology?

Excellent video! What is the impact of the EvoMedEd curricular materials on student learning and retention?  

This project sounds fantastic! The way it turns evolutionary biology from a concept to be memorized/something people might see as irrelevant in daily life into a foundational component of something of interest to anyone is great for student engagement. Also it's interesting to see what else is happening on campus (I'm a new educator at the MSU Museum). 

This project sounds fantastic! The way it turns evolutionary biology from a concept to be memorized/something people might see as irrelevant in daily life into a foundational component of something of interest to anyone is great for student engagement. Also it's interesting to see what else is happening on campus (I'm a new educator at the MSU Museum). 

Fascinating project! Will the materials also show educators how they satisfy curricular/standards requirements? That may help with getting districts & teachers to adopt them.

Hello Pete and MSU team! Fantastic (and entertaining) video production there - congrats on that as well as on this cool project overall. It seems your visitor comments universally agree how your simple explanations and visual supports are bound to be helpful for clarifying understanding of difficult topics such as those you are addressing. Have you started gathering any data on impacts yet? Would love to hear more about that as well as other insights you are gaining from feedback that will be incorporated into next steps. Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Hi Pete et al., congrats on this, love the video and the ideas driving your project. I'm wondering what the criteria were for selecting the particular examples you use in this new course. Can you fill us in on how you chose them?

This is such a great video and such interesting work! One question that came to mind was whether your approach also incorporates systems thinking tools. Thanks!

 very good talk and interesting project Peter!!

My questions were already answered from above in the threat. Great Work!!