What is general anesthesia? ... You’re unconscious; you’re not supposed to remember; it’s nice if it doesn’t hurt; it’s good if you’re not moving around while the surgeons are operating. And if you take those first four things by themselves, they’re synonymous with death. On that long list of things that are not cool, that’s not cool. This next part is where we sort of earn our money… we keep the patient alive.
– Dr. Emery N. Brown
What is general anesthesia? What does brain activity look like in a patient under anesthesia? How is anesthesia different from sleep? Dr. Emery Brown answers these questions and more as he convinces a Brown University audience that general anesthesia is no mystery. Dr. Brown is a professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT and a professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. His November 13 th lecture at Brown University is a part of Brown's presidential lecture series Thinking Out Loud: Deciphering Mysteries of Our World and Beyond. Dr. Brown's lecture is the second in the series. The first lecture was given by Dr. John Johnson. Read about our discussion with Dr. Johnson here.
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On Wednesday, we continued to discuss Science Education, this time focusing less on theory and more on practice. We began by reading an article called “Reducing the gender gap in the physics classroom,” written by members of Professor Mazur’s lab at Harvard (note: we are very excited to have Professor Mazur visit our class later in November!). We thought the results were compelling, and discussed whether the reduced gender gap was a result of more inclusive teaching or simply better teaching, and if it is possible to differentiate between the two. We then moved on to talk about a book chapter we read from Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol called “The Savage Inequalities of Public Education in New York.” We found the scenes described by this book chilling, and talked about what it meant for us to be focusing on bias and discrimination among scientists at such an elite level when the racism of our public education system often prevents students from attending and learning in primary school and high school. We know that there is work to be done here at Brown to make the scientific community more inclusive, but agreed that we must always keep the broader context of educational inequality described by Kozol in mind when discussing these topics and designing interventions. We also read some articles about Richard Tapia’s minority scientist program at Rice and single-sex schools’ effect on girls interested in STEM.
On Wednesday we continued our discussion of “well represented minorities”, specifically focusing on Asians and Asian Americans. We read the National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education (CARE) Report on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in higher education. This report discusses Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in both 2-year and 4-year institutions of higher education. In our discussion we noted that the ‘model minority’ myth silences Asian Americans who do not attend one of the nation’s top 4-year colleges.
We also read Coloring the Academic Landscape: Faculty of Color Breaking the Silence in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities. We found this article to be a very good model for discussing challenges faced by minorities without needing to focus specifically on underrepresented minorities. We also found this article to address well the vital importance of intersectionality, the idea that an individual cannot be broken down into distinct identity groups, but rather that the interplay of multiple disadvantaged identities creates unique perspectives. “Well represented minorities” present a very interesting perspective. While they are well represented at lower levels, they are still not found in management positions and positions of power. This is true despite the rampant stereotypes that Asian Americans are incredibly intelligent and hard working (in short, the 'model minority' myth). We determined from this that stereotypes do not tell the whole story. It is not true that scientists perform as well as the stereotype predicts they will. If this were true, we would see more Asian Americans in positions of power. We found that the structures in place in academic science do more than disadvantage women and underrepresented minorities. These structures actually privilege white men. The rest of our discussion focused on the idea that Asian Americans are labeled as ‘perpetual foreigners’ and the xenophobia that produces this stereotype. We also discussed the need for equality beyond representation. Asian Americans have achieved representation in science similar to the proportion of Asian Americans in the American population at large. However we have yet to achieve equality as evidenced by the distinct lack of Asian Americans in positions of power. On Monday, October 20 we began discussing the experiences of Asians and Asian-Americans in STEM in the United States. Students commented that generalizing the experiences of a wide range of people from dozens of different backgrounds is not only difficult but counterproductive, and even offensive. That, combined with the limited research available on Asian-Americans in STEM specifically and higher ed in general, made this discussion difficult right from the start.
The article Deconstructing the Model Minority Myth lays out well the primary concepts behind the stereotype of the “model minority”, a term often applied to Asian-American populations. There exists a pressure for Asian-Americans to conform to a perfectionist stereotype, meanwhile other stereotypes such as the “Yellow Peril” and “perpetual foreigner” stereotype may cause Asian-Americans to feel less welcome in the United States. Myths and Mirrors, another reading for this class, describes how these stereotypes might affect Asian-American students. One interesting component of the Myths and Mirrors reading was its chart contrasting typical American values with typical Asian values. One student commented that the American values listed were in fact male American values, including the “promotion of personal accomplishments” and “tough, individualistic, authoritative leadership”. We wondered if these values were inextricable from the way science is conducted or not, and tried to imagine a scientific community which espoused different values, perhaps ones more similar to those in the Asian values column. The “bamboo ceiling” phenomenon occurs where Asian Americans are absent from leadership roles in the communities and companies in which they otherwise succeed. We struggled to come to a conclusion about to what extent Asian Americans’ differing cultural values might contribute to this phenomenon. On the one hand, it is true that values such as humility and anti-individualism might hamper one’s ability to be seen as a leader in the United States. On the other hand, it may be that non-Asians assume that Asian-Americans possess certain cultural values or attributes even though they may not. The way in which we talk about this particular issue is tricky; we don’t want to impose static cultural values on an entire group of people, or to use reductionist reasoning to explain the differences in achievement and perceptions of different racial or cultural groups. Still, some students thought it very likely that some foreign students genuinely have different values and expectations than domestic students (ex. How permissible do they find it to question authority figures?). Overall we wondered why there isn’t much talk in general about racial issues and prejudices facing Asian Americans in STEM and at Brown. Perhaps, one student suggested, Asians preferred to be, as they often are, lumped in with Whites and not seen as a racial minority. In this way Asians might be able to more easily access whiteness and make their differences a bit more invisible. Another student suggested that foreign students with very strong ties to their home countries might not have as much stake in changing Americans’ perceptions of Asians while they are here. Conversations that do take place about Asian-American racial issues are often unproductive. For instance, Asian-Americans are often pitted against African-Americans in an attempt to show that it is perfectly possible for racial minorities to succeed using the current systems in the United States. Just last week Bill O’Reilly used the performance of Asian Americans to argue that white privilege doesn’t exist in a conversation with Jon Stewart. This rhetoric (presuming all Asian-Americans are the same and all achieve the same level of success with little or no barriers) fails to properly address the experiences of actual people of Asian ancestry in the U.S. On Monday October 6, we were fortunate enough to engage in a lunchtime discussion with Dr. John Johnson, professor of astrophysics at Harvard. Dr. Johnson is the first tenured black professor at Harvard in the physical sciences. He was invited to give a talk at Brown as a part of Brown's Thinking Out Loud speaker series. Watch Dr. Johnson's riveting talk, Searching for Life Basking in the Warmth of Other Suns below. Our discussion was focused not on astrophysics, but rather on Dr. Johnson's lived experiences and his insight into the issues we are discussing in this course. Our discussion ranged from the ineffectiveness of the GRE to the necessity of attacking actions, and not people. Dr. Johnson has spent a lot of time reading up on and thinking about the issues we are discussing in this course. We really enjoyed hearing his thoughts and reading his blog. On Monday we explored the scientist identify and specifically how it intersects, interferes or conflicts with other identities. We used a mixture of history, data, narratives and observations to inform our ideas about the “ownership” of the scientist identity. Our discussion started with a short history article detailing the transition from a female dominated computer science world to the male dominated one we have today. This piece highlighted the institutional barriers and cyclic controls that are intentionally established to push women out (and keep them out) once computer science became a science and computer scientists became scientists. Women could not own the identity scientist as long as they were women, not because these identities actually are incompatible, but because society says they are. The characterization of science and scientists by society is the root of the conflict between certain identities and the scientist identity. This is why when children are asked what a scientist looks like they all describe Albert Einstein. This is not only problematic because it is not always true, but because misrepresentation and underrepresentation do effect one’s feelings towards science and one’s ability to do science and to be a scientist. This relationship is expressed well in a paper we read that used data collected from thousands of students in many different countries to show that there is a relationship between the female/male academic performance gap and the degree to as which science is seen as male or female. Through our discussion, we affirmed how damaging the narrow description of scientist can be, but we also discovered a simple way to begin to combat it: validation. This is in no way a solution, but it is a place to start. Validate the “non-traditional” scientist and own the identity of scientist no matter one’s other identities.
Our class discussion on Wednesday the 24th focused exclusively on one reading: Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele. We invited Professor James Valles, chair of the physics department, in to contribute to our discussion, as we knew he had read this book before and had experience dealing with the issues surrounding stereotype threat within his own department. The sections we read in Whistling Vivaldi were Chapters 1, 2, 9, and 10. These sections first outline the definition of stereotype threat and the preliminary studies that initially outlined the phenomenon, then provide a variety of interventions and strategies that may be used to alleviate the reduced intellectual performance of groups affected by it. At its most basic level, stereotype threat occurs when the fear of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group (ex. Girls can’t do math as well as boys, Latino students aren’t as intelligent as white students, white athletes aren’t as talented as black ones, etc.) causes a type of background anxiety which impairs performance and thereby perpetuates the stereotype. Studies show that, since most people have already been exposed to our society’s set of stereotypes countless times, this threat is often “in the air” even when racial or gender stereotypes are not mentioned explicitly before people perform tasks relating to them. What this means is that it often takes a conscious effort to alleviate the problem at hand and to reduce underperformance by stereotyped groups. We started discussion by polling the room to see who had previously heard the term “stereotype threat” outside of the context of our GISP. Although quite a few students had heard it used before, some had not, and even more stated that reading sections from Steele’s book had changed the way they understood the term. A few people said that they had thought of stereotype threat as a purely individual issue rather than a systemic problem. After this reading, however, we all came to see the term as referring to something much broader and more insidious. Still, many students in the group claimed to have individually experienced this phenomenon themselves in science and math settings at Brown. A large part of this class was devoted to writing up the following list of “interventions”, many of which were suggested in Whistling Vivaldi, as strategies to alleviate stereotype threat among students at Brown:
On Monday, we looked at this NSF document and discussed whether the numbers given matched our experiences, and what we thought the report left out. We then moved on to look at an article written by Professor Anne Fausto-Sterling about a class taught at Brown in the 80s similar to ours in subject area but different in structure. For example, our class will look less at narratives and non-traditional forms of science, and more at social science. We discussed the merits of these two approaches, and decided that we were comfortable with our focus but would like to take a second look at our syllabus in light of this article and will include more readings about minority-serving institutions.
Wednesday’s class centered on establishing background in some theories in the philosophy of science, as well as drawing connections between these theories and the main subject matter of our GISP. We began by discussing Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science who asserts that what we think of as “normal science” exists within a given “paradigm,” and argues that transitions between paradigms are important “scientific revolutions,” which are highly influenced by non-objective/non-scientific forces. We then moved to discussing Helen Longino’s “Science as Social Knowledge,” which stresses the social factors that play into the production of scientific knowledge, and begins to critique the purported objectivity of science based on this intrusion of social forces. We then discussed the implications of these readings for the main subject matter of this GISP, i.e. race and gender in the scientific community. We discussed how social forces could lead to underrepresentation and bias within scientific fields, as well as how the social nature of science plays into paradigm choice. Of particular interest near the end of our discussion was how to translate the lessons learned from these readings into actual change. For instance, we discussed the difficulty of bringing up these issues with scientists who have never thought about them before. On Friday, influenced by Kuhn's definition of paradigm, we discussed who gets left out of the scientific community and why. We looked at the peer review process and noticed that this process allows the current scientists to shape the future generations of scientists, allowing for a conservative social structure. We then thought about what a more fair system for determining merit in the scientific community might look like. During our discussion we asked ourselves whether survival (i.e. integrating into the scientific community, and perhaps forfeiting one's unique identity in the process) or resistance (i.e. broadening the definition of a scientist to include oneself) is more important for underrepresented individuals in the scientific community. We ended our discussion with a conversation about our midterm projects, which will focus on data collection and fact finding at Brown. The problems being studied by this GISP are embedded in our society at a fundamental, structural level. But despite this large-scale nature, it is important that we not neglect the crucial role of the individual experience. To that end, our second class meeting was dedicated to a discussion of personal experiences.
Before class, each GISP member was asked to write a personal narrative piece, in which they would reflect on their personal experiences in the context of the issues being investigated in this course. During the class discussion, each student summarized the main themes of their narrative and/or shared a few excerpts from the piece. While each student’s story was unique, there were a few common concepts present in multiple narratives. One such concept was the trend of explicit exclusion. One story told of how a student was informed by a professor that their background might be insufficient for a certain class, despite this professor knowing nothing about the student’s background; quite evidently, the professor’s remark was based on the student’s demographics. Another story involved students of certain demographic groups being given explicitly different academic and career advice than students of the dominant demographic groups. Whether intentional or not, this act served to directly exclude the students in question from fully succeeding in their scientific careers. Not all interactions were as explicit as these, however. Some experiences were much more subtle, falling into a category of events known as microaggressions. Microaggressions can be defined as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership" (Granger 2012). Multiple students shared stories of specific microaggressions that they have encountered within the scientific community. Since microaggressions are often not evident to those not directly involved, this part of the discussion was incredibly beneficial in helping the class gain a better understanding of how pervasive microaggressions are in the scientific community and why that is problematic. Another recurring concept was the higher level of expectation applied to members of underrepresented groups. One student described how, unlike members of well-represented groups, they felt that they were expected to, in some sense, earn their place in the sciences. Another student explained that they felt they only deserved to stay in their field if they were at the “top of the curve”; if their performance declined below the very best, they experienced a sense of shame that caused them to consider leaving their field. The last pervasive concept was the dichotomy between different communities at Brown with respect to these issues. Several students described the harsh difference between progressive communities at Brown, where issues of race and gender were constantly discussed, and the scientific community at Brown, where issues of race and gender were essentially never mentioned and where structural inequalities were still strongly present. Overall, the class discussion of the personal narratives proved incredibly fruitful. It enabled students to better understand the backgrounds and motivations of their classmates, and it highlighted several key issues that will undoubtedly resurface again over the course of the semester. References Granger, Nathaniel. "Microaggressions and Their Effects on the Therapeutic Process." Society for Humanistic Psychology Newsletter (Oct. 2012). APA Division 32: Society for Humanistic Psychology. American Psychological Association. Web. 17 Sept. 2014. |