Dr. McGuire Interview
Ryan: I wanted to thank you again for agreeing to this opportunity and for talking with us. We are super excited by the fact that BIO 200 is now a WGS elective.
Can you tell us a little bit about this class and what led you to identify it as a WGS elective?
Dr. McGuire: I have been working with Elizabeth for a couple semesters now and helping to support the WGS program. And prior to those discussions about how WGS is trying to expand electives across courses, we had been working on integrating more science and society content woven throughout the course. One, because it’s really important that biology is not distinctly framed from societal issues and topics. And I’m hoping that BIO 100 can go in that direction too, but BIO 200 is great because it’s the biology of organisms. Historically, it’s been split down the middle between plants and animals, and just taught in a more traditional model where you just go by textbook chapter. So what I’ve been working on doing the past few years is taking the learning goals and using research cases to help meet the learning goals. And I saw a really great opportunity to be able to really talk about human health, environmental and social injustices, especially in the context of medical research. I think that that’s a really interesting way to help students develop skills in asking good questions about who gets to do research, who the research is done on, who gets included in the acknowledgements, and just being very critical thinkers about not just the quality of the research but the bigger societal ethics around these choices when it comes to working with or without people’s permission. So there’s this long history that is really foundational to discussion about biology of organisms topics through human lenses.
Ryan: That’s really fascinating and amazing work. I know that when I was growing up, biology and similar STEM fields were treated as “read the book, do the work,” and even though biology does introduce gender ideas in organisms and whatnot, there was never really the WGS lens applied to it until, well, now.
Dr. McGuire: I think part of what you’re alluding to is that biology in general has been taught really binary, and I think part of the problem with that is, one, it’s often really inaccurate. It’s simpler to teach that way, because it’s easy to say “it’s this or this, just start here with this or this comparison.” But what it leaves out is that there’s a whole spectrum across all biology topics. And students in intro biology are told, “start here with this binary comparison and you’ll get into the nuance later.” But what I think that doesn’t do for most students and education in general is help students sit with complexity, and start to become comfortable with being uncomfortable with that complexity. And I think that’s really important, because when you’re talking about something like biological sex, there are really wonderful resources that are, one, accurate, and two, very clear about – for example, there are thousands of fungi mating types that are not one sex or the other. If you’re looking at the gametes – sex cells – there’s matching gametes that are fertilized but they’re not one sex or the other, they’re just matching, and any of the matching gametes can fertilize. On the other hand, if you’re looking at gametes that are not matching, like human gametes – an egg or a sperm – those are a different category entirely. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that one of the gametes correlates specifically to the sex of the whole organism. So there’s a really interesting and important nuance that if students are just shown “this or this,” it’s actually a really inaccurate picture of the diversity of reproductive biology. So I think that’s a really important entry point. There’s this wonderful open-source resource that we’ve been using called Project Biodiversify both in BIO 100 and BIO 200, and then developing cases that better frame and help address a lot of student misconceptions around these topics. So that’s the entry point for these parallels with WGS, is teaching biology more accurately, one, is great, and two, just happens to be more aligned with WGS topics.
What makes your BIO 200 course different from the average 200-level Biology course in your view?
Dr. McGuire: I think an average course, as I mentioned, is really commonly taught in a consistent lecture style, where the professor gets up there, talks chapter by chapter, it alternates between plants and animals, there’s a lot of memorization, high-stakes testing, and that’s kind of it, that’s the major portion of the lecture piece. In labs, there’s a real diversity of how biology of organisms class labs run. But I think the combination of our class, where we teach these really critical concepts through these research cases, gives students a really important grounding and reasoning both across scales but also across science and society topics. So whether it’s medical research or sex testing in the olympics, policy-based questions, those are really great ways to, one, get students interested in these topics, but also to teach biology better. I think the most important thing about this is that we use a variety of assessments. So we have written assessments that students can submit drafts for, we have in-class activities, we have pre-class questions to help students have a baseline coming in, and we have a series of small graded questions throughout the semester. And how that’s different is, with each of those, we can track how students are engaging with a class, and use that as data points to understand how our students learn. And so all these different modes of learning, instead of two or three high-stakes tests and that’s it, one, gives students a chance to submit drafts, and two, gives students a chance to interact with these research cases in a more in-depth way, so they interact with it and then the concepts come back in each subsequent research case. And so the first time they’re sitting with a learning style that might be really uncomfortable compared to the traditional lecture learning style, where they’re just sitting there and listening, but they’re doing the work. I think that’s what makes the biggest difference is who’s doing it.
The model that changes is a traditional lecture-style class like this, where almost all of the time is lecture. Historically, all of this would be lectures, and then students would do exams, and that’s it. But what we do now is we’ve kind of flipped it on its head and made it more that I facilitate, we all do the modeling and learning together, students do work together in class, and then students apply it in a different context. So basically we’ve flipped the amount of time that I spend talking at the students with the students engaging purposefully with the material. I think that’s the big difference for how the traditional lecture structure in some of these classes works, and I think what we’ve done is a lot of research nationally to show that students learn better through that approach.
So what is your academic background or training? Did you take any WGS courses in college, and if not, when or how did you develop an interest in WGS?
Dr. McGuire: I didn’t take WGS questions in college. I’ve always been interested in the topic but I’m not a WGS scholar. My academic background is ecology, environmental sciences, and sustainability, so I’ve always been interested in this interaction between humans and the environment, humans and living systems. I think a lot of my personal interest comes out of growing up in a diverse household with a lot of complexity, and so I think having a lot of different identities at our family table really allowed for a very consistent and critical thinking process for how we interact in the world and with each other when people are really different or very similar in terms of examining racism or sexism or classism in terms of injustices. When I was in middle school, I think that was probably where I first got actively involved. I was part of the first civil rights team in the state of Maine and also in the country. There was a group through the attorney general’s office and the state of Maine recruited schools to pilot small teams of students to get really in-depth conflict management training and civil rights training, broadly speaking. That was the point where what was very personal because of the diversity of my family became something that I saw as “I can do this anywhere, in any field. I’m interested in the sciences, why can’t it also be applied there?” So I think that just grew throughout both my education and my various careers that I had between undergraduate and graduate school.
Ryan: So you’d say that your history with a diverse household showed you that these sort of topics can be applied anywhere?
Dr. McGuire: Everywhere, yeah. I feel very passionate about it. There’s a lot more pushback in STEM fields. People get wrapped up in covering all the content. But if you think about any intro BIO class, basic biology is BIO 100, Biology of Organisms is BIO 200, you could take any one topic and it’s a lifetime of study. We can’t possibly cover absolutely everything. Just think about the pandemic and how much changed in our understanding of the human immune system in less than a year, and how that completely revolutionized the study of immunology and epidemiology. If you’re just looking at this one tiny little topic, you could spend a lifetime on that. The opportunity that I see is that we can have these complex, challenging discussions through the lens of these really fascinating, cross-scale biology topics, and it’s going to graduate students, especially in the human health fields, who are more able to interact in ways that are going to support human health broadly. And that includes decreasing racism and sexism in their workplaces in the health fields. And that includes getting the training to examine complexity in any STEM field is a really critical skill that we should all have incorporated in all of our classes.
Ryan: I can absolutely agree with that. One of the most valuable things that I’ve learned in my background in philosophy and WGS is how to approach complexity.
Dr. McGuire: Yeah. What I’m learning from Elizabeth and what I’m learning from students like you is the language I didn’t have immersion in. And this is where I worked with students a couple years ago in Project Q through the honors college with Jennie Woodard to get feedback on one of my modules that I’ve been developing about sex testing in the olympics. Really thinking about intersectionality as applied in the biological sciences. And I think that comes back to the importance of complexity. I think there’s a lot of really fascinating research articles that show that when students can see complexity and see themselves not purposefully excluded in a science classroom, they’re more likely to succeed in pursuing that degree. So, coming back to biological sex – which I know is a hot-button topic – if biology professors only introduce the binary, which is not biologically accurate, it not only is not accurate but also excludes a lot of students from feeling like they belong in the world or in the field. So I think inadvertently by teaching it inaccurately because people are uncomfortable with the topic, we do a disservice to the field, we do a disservice to our students, we do a disservice to our communities. I think that’s how we can really integrate all of this, by examining accuracy and belonging, and how that makes such a difference for many, many, many students.
Ryan: I know there’s a study that shows the more people see themselves represented in media, the more likely they are to achieve the things that media is portraying them doing, or them feeling less opposed by society to do these things. And it’s very interesting to see that this applies to STEM fields like biology.
Dr. McGuire: There’s a lot there around belonging and there’s a lot of really great new work being done to improve it. As an instructor, staying on top of those advances in education and the literature that’s coming out that really ties learning with belonging and learning with improving accuracy, even if it makes us uncomfortable because we didn’t learn that way, it’s going to lead to not just better biologists, but better citizens coming out of our programs.
What is a specific assignment from your BIO 200 class that strikes you as especially correlated to a WGS approach to biology?
Dr. McGuire: Yeah, I can talk you through it! There’s a couple, but a big one I’ve shared with Elizabeth before is one we’ve been developing over a couple of years. We have a lab week where it is woven throughout. It is a specific interaction with how science and society can be incorporated into any lab discussion. So we just spent a few weeks doing a heart and lung cardiopulmonary lab experiment using our own data and then examining the type of questions we can’t ask with our population. And so that brings up a question about how choices in the medical research field about who are and are not included in studies, as well as historical injustices that came out of medical research, allow us to think more critically about our own data. For example, the article that we asked students to read before lab, and some pre-class questions to go along with it, is from 1992 and is called “Wanted: Single White Male for Medical Research.” And then during the lab, there is a literature bank of six different articles that they can use for discussion with their classmates. So it’s communicating the value of race and ethnicity in research, and how some clinical trials have far too little racial and ethnic diversity. There’s a new one we’re including that we’re including this year that is a great letter by a couple of doctors who argue that more trials need to include nonbinary, trans, or queer-identifying people in research, just like other groups when you have marginalization or external stressors in society. They’re arguing that it is important to understand what those constant societal stressors are doing to their bodies. And so all of these students work with them. The TA will assign an article, the students will read it, and then they’ll work together in labs to discuss the importance of why you would include different groups in this discussion that are usually left out of typical Biology of Organisms classes. Cardiopulmonary research can be completely taught without any human context, but once you step back and ask who is included, why are they included, and the history of injustices regarding race, sex, mental illness, gender, all of these demographics that are important to consider, you see that exclusion is doing a large disservice to human health. And so they go through this process of exploration, using evidence from the literature to understand what is actually the problem with leaving these people out. There are a couple of examples of medical issues that are compromised through exclusion, like breast cancer, heart failure, preterm birth rate, and various other diseases. The other thing we ask them to do is really consider general diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in biomedical studies. They’ll use those case studies that they’ve read, then look up another study that they’re interested in, and then think about the biases in the study. They’ll then think through the history, the biology, and then come up with potential solutions for that bias. They have to apply both the societal context that they’ve gone through a couple iterations of developing, and then the biological knowledge they’ve spent the weeks developing, and then think about how it could be done better. I think that’s the assignment that is really well-aligned with Gender Studies.
Ryan: That’s remarkably interesting. If you took away the “biology lab” environment from the exercise, it actually sounds very similar to a lot of thought exercises WGS will employ when looking at societal structures.
Dr. McGuire: Oh that’s interesting!
Going off of that discussion, how do students tend to interact with your course? Do they seem surprised by the material and/or approach, and if so, in what ways?
Dr. McGuire: Yeah, I think any surprise or frustration is striking in BIO 100, since most of our students are just coming out of high school, and so they’ve spent the last eighteen years where most of their work is memorization or work sheet-driven, and now we’re asking them to work through questions that don’t always have a right or wrong answer. Biological context often has a right or wrong answer, but it’s always more complex, so we ask them to think about how they’re applied across these biological scales, what’s the context we’re talking about more broadly, and I think that is uncomfortable when students first start in BIO 100. I think by BIO 200, however, students are more comfortable with the approach. Especially in labs we see that comfort is really effective before they’re learning, so I think they’re much more able to incorporate nuance. We do regular reflections throughout the semester, and we hear really good things from students overall about being asked to think about these questions regularly in the context of the cardiopulmonary experiment, and even maple syrup! We ask them to think about the sociopolitical and economic context in maple syrup as we’re learning about how trees’ vascular systems function, so I think that they’re more comfortable with that way of thinking by the time they get to BIO 200. And I hope that if they’re able to have that skill set of being thoughtful about context, uncertainty, and nuance so refined in these two semesters, that in their careers they’ll be better able to interact in a society that is so complex and nuanced and different.
Ryan: Right. I would imagine a strong foundation would go leaps and bounds into helping foster that sort of societal view.
Dr. McGuire: Yes, I hope so. There is certainly resistance to the model. It’s not super comfortable when it’s new, and most of that has to do with the grading structure, and I think students in the beginning are worried that we’ll pull the rug out from under them in that we have a lot of formative assignments: you write a draft, you submit the draft, you get feedback, you improve it, you go forward and write another draft. That process is integrated throughout the entire semester, and there can be a lot of discomfort felt when students simply want to know their grade. There won’t be a solid letter grade until the final, but you get feedback at every step of the way and you receive completion credit. I think there’s more discomfort with that process as opposed to the topics.
Ryan: Interesting. I was about to ask if maybe there was any friction with higher-level biology courses with transitioning to new ideas, but it’s really interesting that it’s the grading structure of the course rather than the ideas themselves that cause discomfort, if any.
Dr. McGuire: It is interesting. When approaching the Sex Testing in the Olympics module, students didn’t all agree, but they were very respectful and reflective, and most of them who did the work leading up to it were able to apply the biology to the case context in a way that’s very sophisticated. They’d then make arguments based on that. Some would even present their thoughts like: “This is my opinion, and I acknowledge that there is no data for it, but this has got me thinking.” And so I think that there are valid questions that students are asking across their varying differences in opinion that I see across the board as an opening to evaluating these ideas more effectively in biology and other STEM fields.
What benefits do you think students might gain from taking courses like BIO 200 if heading into further research or medicine?
Dr. McGuire: We have a great example. I’m working with a current honors student on their committee, and they noticed not unexpectedly that med schools are still very formal and traditional, and that in many cases, the education is leaving a lot of people out. I think a lot of it comes back to this traditional biological format of education: here’s the order of learning, it’s by the book, it’s pure memorization, it doesn’t have anything to do with people. And then students get to med school, and all of a sudden they have to interact with people that all of their training up to that point has purposefully left out. I think the injustices that can come from an educational system build upon themselves if they’re left unexamined and if you don’t have the training to think about it in every context. A great example in our cardiopulmonary unit is that most of the studies about how to treat heart disease purely used men as their models. What that meant is that for decades, women had dramatically high rates of heart disease that did not respond well to typical treatment. A lot of it had to do with the fact that all of the research was on men. And so it did not have the symptoms or impacts, and thus the morbidity rates were higher, and the side effects of medication were more severe. When you think about things like that, which is one simple comparison, you start to think about other discrepancies. What if you’re poor, or don’t have food, or safe housing, or safe water? With cases like that, you see spikes in cancer rates, and so once you’re able to use evidence-based tools to examine injustices, it can help you to be a better practitioner. Understanding the complexity of how these human life spaces interact can better serve doctors, nurses, and physical therapists. There’s a lot of benefit to examining where and how choices we make in science can either perpetuate or break down these injustices.
We once again thank Dr. McGuire for her valuable insight into the evolution and enrichment of both her field and our own. BIO 200 will be offered in the upcoming Spring 2024 semester.