One really interesting outgrowth of the Liberal Arts in India project is a new theatre production, co-authored with Brian Brophy (Caltech) and Usha Darmela (O.P.Jindal), about the life of Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, India’s leading astrophysicist of the 20th century and Nobel laureate. Brian Brophy is a noted actor and theatre producer, and he attended our Liberal Arts in India conference in New Delhi in 2015, where I met him and we hatched this idea. The drama and passion of Chandrasekhar’s life is striking – he left India as a young man in 1930, where he left behind his famous Nobel prize winning uncle, C.V. Raman, his ailing mother (who was to pass away soon afterwards), and the love of his life Lalitha. Thrust into the unknown world of Cambridge England, Chandrasekhar immediately made a deep impression on all who met him with his penetrating insight into the ways that stars work. He worked out on the boat ride to England some key calculations which unlocked the secret of the “Heart of the Stars” – where crushing densities and searing temperatures push matter beyond any conditions known or previously imagined.

Chandra’s mind, and his immaculate and inspired calculations, were able to reveal how deep inside stars the newly discovered physics of relativity and quantum mechanics merge together. This causes the atoms deep inside some stars, like white dwarf stars, to become “degenerate” – which as the mass of the star increases requires the atoms to move faster and faster until they become relativistic, or approach the speed of light.

The phenomenon of relativistic degeneracy, first described by Chandrasekhar in 1930, is what prevents white dwarf stars from collapsing – but only if their mass is below a certain mass threshold. This limit to the mass of a white dwarf is now known as the Chandrasekhar Limit, and is at about 1.4 solar masses. The astrophysics now is well established, but at the time was deeply troubling and threatening to the astrophysical establishment. It placed the future of a large number of stars in jeopardy, and suggested that some stars could collapse to form objects with unlimited density – the black holes!  The “absurdity” of such singularities caused the most eminent scientist of the time, Sir Arthur Eddington, to publicly repudiate Chandrasekhar’s brilliant analysis, ridiculing it as “stellar buffoonery” in a pivotal Royal Society meeting in London.

The drama of the story naturally lends itself into what should be a beautiful play, and hopefully also will be a movie script! The middle of the story is Chandrasekhar’s humiliation at the hands of Eddington, and his courageous revival with the help of Lalitha, and their triumph in the end after 50 years in the US, where not only were all of Chandrasekhar’s calculations shown to be exactly correct, but to predict neutron stars and black holes, a half century before they were observed. In his Nobel Prize banquet speech of 1983, Chandra quotes Rabindranath Tagore’s poem Gitanjali, in what may perhaps be referring to his own “re-awakening” after his arrival to the US,  to a place where “knowledge is free” and “where worlds come out from the depth of truth:”

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
into that haven of freedom, Let me awake.

Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

The drama, and power of the story needs to be heard, and I am looking forward to working with Brian and Usha to bring Chandra’s life to a larger audience through theatre and perhaps even a movie!  It is a great vehicle for teaching about astrophysics through the life of an amazing scientist who is a symbol of Indian intellectual culture, and perhaps most of all a passionate human being who was motivated by his love of beauty, his love of truth, and the love of his life, Lalitha. This sense of aesthetics figures into some of the speeches Chandra has given over the years about Shakespeare, Newton and Beethoven, where he equates the creativity of art and music to that of the scientist. Ultimately he is on a quest for beauty, which he encapsulates in both simple and beautiful words at the end of his 1983 Nobel Prize lecture:

The play is coming together, and is a wonderful way to pay tribute to Chandrasekhar, and embody some of Chandra’s own liberal arts spirit – that blended his science with a deep love of the arts, music and literature. On May 14, Brian Brophy also had a reading of the play with a group of Caltech students and faculty. The poster for that event is below.

caltech_heartofstars_v6

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References

Chandrasekhar’s 1983 Nobel Prize Speech:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1983/chandrasekhar-lecture.pdf

Chandrasekhar’s 1983 Nobel Prize banquet speech:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1983/chandrasekhar-speech.html

Chandrasekhar’s 1975 lecture on Shakespeare, Newton and Beethoven:

http://www.parrikar.org/essays/shakespeare-newton-beethoven/

 

During April, I had a wonderful opportunity to work with Sara Amjad (from the Yale-NUS College Dean of Students office) to create a faculty workshop that brings Sara’s Intercultural Dialogue program to a new format and audience. The format would be a 90 minute Workshop at the end of the semester, and the audience would be faculty – who have for three years now been teaching here in Singapore in what sometimes can be a very different cultural environment than where many of our faculty have been trained. Yale-NUS, like most colleges, has a very diverse campus – its students represent over 50 nations, and unlink campuses in the US, these students who might be thought of as “International” students make up 40 percent of the student body, compared to the 60% Singaporean student contingent. The percentage of American students at Yale-NUS is well less than 10%, making it something of a mirror image of the typical American campus which has 90% American students and 10% “International.”  Our Yale-NUS College faculty are mostly from the US, with contingents from Australia, the UK, and a mix of Asian countries. Bringing an intentional dialog on how cultural assumptions from their own backgrounds and from the students affects their teaching and learning was our goal. Sara has been running this program now for over two years with groups of students, staff and a few faculty – we were hoping to bring this experience to bear in helping our faculty better understand these issues.

Our workshop began with a great introductory exercise – each participant told the story of their first and middle name. The stories were varied and revealed interesting aspects of how extended family played in the choice – with wide ranges of relatives either being the source of the name or providing input – or with interesting stories that tied to the many diverse cultures represented in the room. We discussed the Cultural Orientations Model, which is a varying mix of thinking style, sense of self and interaction style, that often has different proportions by culture. This plays into how we communicate and how what we say is received in the classroom, and we discussed how to structure classrooms to best match student’s cultural orientations.

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The second part of the workshop included examining the distinction between discussion, debate and dialog in the classroom, and how to foster each of these modes of instruction. The ways in which we mix these formats can be helpful or hurtful to students depending on their cultural styles.  The final part was perhaps the most interesting – scenarios constructed by Yale-NUS students were discussed. Sara had done thorough research and interviewed about a dozen of our students to come up with some very interesting scenarios for us to discuss in which faculty or visitors to campus misinterpreted students, made assumptions about their religious backgrounds or other cultural orientations, and how that created awkward and difficult situations. We had groups of 2 assigned to each scenario, which they discussed among themselves and then reported to the entire group of the workshop. The discussion was very lively and enlightening!

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 Discussion Materials

Exploring the Differences Between Discussion Debate and Dialogue Faculty Workshop Scenarios – updated

Faculty Workshop Scenarios – updated_1

From May 5-11 I had the opportunity to visit the lovely city of Melbourne, and work with the astrophysics group at Swinburne University. My host was Michael Murphy, director of the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing. Michael was a postdoc working on quasar spectroscopy at Cambridge when I was there as a Downing Fellow nearly 10 years ago, along with his Swinburne colleague Emma Ryan-Webber. Combining their great expertise with others from the group also active in quasar absorption line spectroscopy – Jeff Cooke and Neil Crighton – and you have one of the best research centers in the world for the (somewhat) specialized field of quasar absorption line studies.

   

 

I gave a talk to the group on May 9, and explained some of the work I have been doing with Damped Lyman Alpha systems, both to detect the “floor” of metallicity in these systems, and to identify trends in the ratios of Carbon to Oxygen in the low-metallicity universe. They also were quite interested in my paper on Deuterium in DLA systems, and the group included several with actual experience working with this difficult topic and publishing similar papers. We immediately identified several areas in which to collaborate, and in particular the need for more accurate and consistent nucleosynthesis yields, which can inform studies like the ones I and Michael have been working. By bringing together the theory and observing communities – perhaps in an upcoming workshop – we can help clarify the nature of the first stars in the universe, and the imprint they leave on the clouds of gas and dust toward quasars.

I truly enjoyed Melbourne, the Swinburne astronomy group, and the friendly collegial atmosphere. I also learned from Jeremy Mould, Director of the Center of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics, that Australia and Singapore are working to create closer ties, and new exchanges for science, culture, technology and industry. I am hopeful that this can enable some closer collaboration and can help me connect to this fascinating group in the coming months and years from my location in Singapore.  The combination of good bike trails, fine beer, Australian rules football and the Victoria Library all will be a great incentive to come back!

On April 29, the NUS University Awards Ceremony included the recognition of the seven newly inducted Fellows for the NUS Teaching Academy. I was honored to be part of the group and attended the ceremony with some of the best of the NUS professors in medicine, law, arts, sciences and humanities. It was a deep honor to be part of the Teaching Academy, and I look forward to working closely with the fellows to help shape some of the NUS policies and innovations in teaching, learning and educational research. The listing of the new fellows is at this site – http://nus.edu.sg/uawards/2016/teachingnewfellow.php, and more information on the NUS teaching academy can be found at their web site at http://www.nus.edu.sg/teachingacademy/. I have already learned a lot from the many events at NUS related to Teaching and Learning, and as a Fellow I can help be even more closely connected to this dynamic university and its very interesting group of scholars!

 

On April 12 and 13, the Global Learning Council (http://www.globallearningcouncil.org/) met at the National University of Singapore. I was invited to attend, and met with leadership from Carnegie Mellon University, NUS, the World Economic Forum, and a very interesting international group with large delegations from Germany, Japan, and several other countries. The theme of the meeting was promoting Technology-Enhanced Learning in Asia – and we were offered several very good talks about the changing landscape of industry, geopolitics, and economics, and how those impacted higher education.

The meeting opened with Dr. Subra Suresh, President of Carnegie Mellon University, and Chor Chuan Tan, President of NUS giving opening talks. Then Lee Howell from the World Economic Forum gave a very interesting talk about the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” – the rise of artificial intelligence, materials science, and biotechnology – that will accelerate technologies and require new models of education. The Fourth Industrial revolution follows the earlier revolutions which gave us power from steam, production lines for Model T’s and processing in the form of computers. From the Davos World Economic Forum, which Lee Howell helps plan, came a very interesting video dramatising this Fourth Industrial Revolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZOkoRuV1R0

(from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZOkoRuV1R0)

After the talk a variety of leaders from industry and government described the skill set needed in 2020. These included skills like complex problem solving, critical thinking, people management, coordination with others, emotional intelligence, judgement, decision-making, and cognitive flexibility. The skills all can be developed from a good liberal arts education – making the Yale-NUS project seem more relevant!  The World Economic Forum provided a “Future Jobs Report” ( http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/ ) – which outlines some of these details. The executive summary of this report is available below:

WEF_FOJ_Executive_Summary_Jobs  (executive summary of the Future of Jobs – PDF).

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Other speakers included the Singaporean Minister of Education, who described their FutureSkills initiative, and a series of speakers from Kaplan, Microsoft and the Gates Foundation. One of my favorite talks was from Kathy Takanaka, the Director of Columbia’s Teaching and Learning Center and Deputy Provost of Undergraduate Education. She described new methods of science teaching in which instructors emphasize the ways in which science probes the unknown, and the value of uncertainty, and “liminality” in science teaching. This idea of “liminality” also comes up in the educational theory of Threshold Concepts, and is a vital way to mobilize students and to create profound and deep learning.

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The meeting was inspiring, thought-provoking, and wonderfully future oriented. The NUS President, Chor Chuan Tan, is one of the board members, and currently director of the GLC. This makes for some great opportunities to get involved in this fascinating organization, and I look forward to their next meeting in Berlin!

 

From March 28-April 1, Hollywood actor and Caltech Theatre Program Director, Brian Brophy visited us at Yale-NUS. His visit was planned to create an Intercultural Theatre project, by exploring some of the cultural diversity at Yale-NUS College, and to offer a workshop on Theatre as Teaching with our Yale-NUS faculty. Brian is also my collaborator on a new play about the Life of Chandrasekhar entitled the Heart of the Stars. We met with him and his wife, and learned more about his recent work in India at the O.P. Jindal Global University.

Then with Sara Amjad of the Dean of Students office, we met with Brian and planned out the week. Brian was to create a performance with Yale-NUS students where they would enact scenes where their cultural heritage were showcased. He worked with them over several evenings, and in those workshops the students had deep discussions about their cultural backgrounds, and created sketches among themselves. On the final night a few of the top scenes were recreated for an audience, and the audience was encouraged to interact with the students, and make reflective observations on their project.

The other piece of Brian’s visit was a faculty workshop for the CTL on Theatre as Teaching. This workshop included about 15 Yale-NUS and NUS faculty, who heard from Brian about his experiences teaching, and working with the Theatre of the Oppressed in India.  Brian also tried to link different faculty together and to encourage them to use role playing and other forms of theatre in their teaching.

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One of the many joys of living in Singapore is the close proximity of some amazing countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, are all within a short hop on a discount airline. When one of those countries has a total solar eclipse in them, all the better!   This is what happened on March 9, 2016. In neighboring Indonesia, the total eclipse was passing through, making a graceful arc across the South China Sea up through Ternate. Even though this was in the middle of my Yale-NUS College semester, I was not going to pass up a total solar eclipse!  So Bidushi and I booked a short hop flight to Palembang, which was on the path of the totality.

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My friend Jay Pasachoff, a veteran eclipse observer and one of the world’s top solar astronomers, warned against this site – saying he had bad luck there on a previous eclipse. Jay, of course, was located up in Ternate with a team of photographers waiting to catch the best possible view. Bidushi and I were looking for speed – and Palembang provided it. Only about one hour away on AirAsia, and with lots of cheap and available hotels. We booked our flight and looked forward to the event!  We arrived to Palembang the day before the event; Bidushi and her friends from a local company here in Singapore known as Hiverlab (http://www.hiverlab.com/) had arranged for a fish-eye all sky camera gadget using GoPros. We tested it on the roof of our apartment before going and were all set for a great immersive VR recording of the event!

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As the eclipse day came, we got very excited. Our hotel had a nice porch where we could set up our all-sky viewing gadget, and my camera with its fancy new telephoto lens. We got up very early, and enjoyed the sunrise from the roof and eagerly awaited the eclipse!

 

     

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As the event unfolded, some clouds gathered. The cooling from the partial phase of the eclipse seemed to cause some additional clouds to condense. Despite the heavy and gathering clouds, we could see the sun begin to darken, and the partial phase deepen. The temperature dropped further, and darkness set in. Then the totality!  Despite the thick clouds, my camera was able to take a couple of good pictures through the clouds of the total eclipse.  We were thrilled – and enjoyed being enveloped into cool darkness in Indonesia, just after sunrise!

Our eclipse photos (through clouds): 

   

 

 

 

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After the eclipse we walked around Palembang. We were struck by how friendly the people were. “Hello sir” “Hello sir” said kids as they ran up to me. I felt like a rock star!  The city itself was a large sprawling industrial town. A large river ran through the town and we had a nice relaxing lunch at the river and watched the barges go by. They use the river to transport huge barges of coal and other things to various parts of Indonesia. The food was good, the people friendly – and the sun restored.

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After we returned to Singapore, Bidushi and I gave a talk to a full classroom at the Singapore Science Center on March 11. We showed the group a comparison of the eclipse as viewed from Thailand, from Singapore and from the totality. We even found a movie clip of the eclipse taken from an airplane, and from a Japanese weather satellite in space!  The students and public in the crowd seemed to really enjoy the talk, and even liked our photos through the clouds. A great experience!

 

   

During the Feb 29-March 5 visit Jenny Frederick provided an amazing workshop on how people learn at Yale-NUS College. The workshop, entitled “Teaching to Prioritize Learning” included a wonderful in situ experiment in learning, where the group was divided into two, and asked to perform a series of tasks as if in a classroom setting. The two groups were given different handouts, however, and Jenny masterfully demonstrated how the different handouts could either enhance learning or block it.  Jenny was able to show how memory can be bolstered by materials that help organize the knowledge by grouping facts together into categories. Those of our colleagues who had such handouts vastly outperformed the “control” group who were left floundering. This message was that as teachers we owe it to our students to scaffold what we do with multiple aids to their learning; and to infuse those materials we hand out with systematic and conceptual groupings that help them process the information more effectively.

Within Jenny’s talk was also a graph of how memory can be interefered with by lack of attention or just saturation from too much information. This is a part of the growing both of research that documents how lecturing will not work after a relatively short period (10-15 minutes) after which the mind is incapable of processing much of the information. Jenny advocates not only bundling concepts or facts in logical ways, but infographics and other diagrams that can aid learning.

Another point that she made was that students often have preconceptions that need to be addressed carefully in teaching. These preconceptions can lead to “confirmation bias” in which students look for patterns consistent with preconceived ideas. It is important to enable students to test patterns and evidence for themselves and to discuss what they find to help break these misconceptions whenever possible. The use of “retrieval practice” can also facilitate learning and has been shown to boost learning more than more elaborate study practices. This form of retrieval practice which uses tests that assess comprehension and requires students to make inferences also improved conceptual learning, according to a recent article by Karpicke and Blunt (2011) in an article published in Science.

Our Yale-NUS faculty really enjoyed the talk by Jenny, and were impressed to not only see some of the results of learning science put into practice, but to gather data themselves – as test subjects of a short experiment!

References

Karpicke, J.D., and Blunt, J.R., 2011, Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping, Science, 331, p. 772.

Accessible from  http://learninglab.psych.purdue.edu/downloads/2011_Karpicke_Blunt_Science.pdf

Teaching-to-prioritize-learning-Yale-NUS-Feb-2016 – Slides from Jenny’s talk

Teaching-to-prioritize-learning-Yale-NUS-Feb-2016 How-People-Learn_Activity-Handouts-Scoring-Sheet – Scoring sheet for workshop

From Feb 29-March 5, we hosted a visit by both Scott Strobel, Deputy Provost for Teaching and Learning at Yale, and Jennifer Frederick, Director of the Yale Teaching Center. During the visit, both of them visited all three Divisions at Yale-NUS College, and discussed Teaching and Learning at Yale-NUS with a wide cross section of faculty, administrators, and even some students. This post is about Scott and his presentation on “Plastic-Eating Fungi & Other Wonders Discovered by Yale Undergraduates” to the Yale-NUS College Science Division.  The talk centered on a course offered at Yale in which students study endophytes, a variety of fungus, both at New Haven in class, and in the rainforests of Ecuador. During their fieldwork they collect new endophytes, which they bring back to Yale for further study in the laboratory. The program includes a summer program where students spend the rest of the summer characterizing these new organisms, in many cases discovering new species with amazing properties (hence the title of his talk!).

Scott pointed out that the experiential nature of the course, and the type of science it covers, is an “accessible entry point for novice scientists to do original research.”  He is also conscious of the many positive features of the course – it gives students ownership, provides uncertainty about outcomes, is a “vast” area of study with multiple possible directions, has “fundable and publishable observations,” and “seamlessly ties together the teaching and research missions” of Yale College.  The course embodies a very nice mix of active learning, experiential learning, and authentic learning, with assessments that in some cases enable students to develop scientific papers, or even patents!

The subject of endophytes is new to many non-biologists. Scott explained that there are over 1 million plan associated fungi of which about 80% are unknown. The project has been described in the scientific literature (Bascom-Slack and Strobel, 2012; Strobel and Strobel, 2007).

The course begins with students choosing plants to study, and in this pursuit they engage in a bit of ethnobiology. Some plants were known by local people to kill fish, to heal snake bites, and to take care of infections. In collaboration with the Catholic University of Ecuador, Scott and his 18 students forge into the Yasuni National Forest, which has sites which offer the most biodiverse environments in South America.  Once there, after long journeys on roads built for oil exploration, they seek out the plants described by local people with bioactive properties. Many of these properties are endowed upon the plants from the little microbes living on them – the endophytes.

Scott is assisted in this course by Percy Nunez, a local guide who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the plants, and he equips the students with flash cards so they can identify the plants they are seeking. Students take samples, and within these samples are typically 25-150 microbe species – most of them completely unclassified by biology!  Scott told us that over the years, he has had about 126 undergraduates in this course, and not only do they discover new species but in some cases a new genus – averaging about one new genus per student per year!

From the plants they isolate the endophytes, and then from this they extract liquid cultures and chemical compounds. Each year he studies about 500 fungal extracts per student, and from these can come volatile antibiotics (capable of killing bacteria at a distance), also fuel additives, and a species that can degrade plastics. Perhaps this can be a solution to many of the most urgent issues facing our environment and health – all within the context of an undergraduate course!

The audience of 18 Yale-NUS faculty were very interested in the project, and our Foundations of Science course is hoping to build in this same type of discovery-based work at Yale-NUS College, and we hope to introduce students to this type of research in the coming years.

References

Bascom-Slack, CA, Arnold, EA, and Strobel, SA (2012). Student-Directed Discovery of the Plant Microbiome and its Products. Science 338:485-486

Strobel, S. A., & Strobel, G. A. (2007). Plant endophytes as a platform for discovery-based undergraduate science education. Nature chemical biology, 3(7), 356-359).

Readings related to Scott Strobel and his Endophytes course – Plastic-Eating-Fungi-Other-Wonders-Discovered-by-Yale-Undergraduate_Scott-Strobel- (includes Journal articles on the course).

After being a student again for much of Fall semester, I have graduated! This effort was to obtain a postgraduate certificate in the Scholarship of Educational Leadership (SoEL) in Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia (UBC). The program is organized by Harry Hubball, and has been offered across the world to groups of academics in universities in Asia, Africa, North America and Europe. The UBC program is described at this link: http://international.educ.ubc.ca/soel/. At the National University of Singapore they have had two cohorts of SoEL graduates, who are nominated by the Provost of NUS, or in my case by the Yale-NUS College. The experience included writing an SoEL portfolio, that included an educational leadership statement, a review of the SoTL literature in three different theme areas, an internal formative document assessing an area of work that I am doing at Yale-NUS College (in my case interdisciplinary science courses), and an educational research project which is presented in writing and in a presentation. My research project was to assess the Yale-NUS College Foundations of Science course, and whether it provides an authentic learning environment for students. The package of SoEL materials is sent to external reviewers from UBC, and they look over the writing and interview each of the candidates by Skype. At the end, the postgraduate certificate is awarded – a nice prize for all the hard work!  More than the certificate, the program is rewarding from the perspectives it gives on all aspects of academics, and for having a chance to work closely with some of the best academics at the National University of Singapore. Our cohort, or batch, it shown below!  I am also happy to share my Educational Leadership portfolio – the PDF file is available at this link: Bryan.Penprase.SoTL.Dossier.Jan.11.2016. I had a great experience with this course, and I am happy to answer questions for anyone interested in the program.