Another reason why Leicester is an interesting place

Derek explains the reception menu at the pi-CETL launch

I suppose this should go up on the i-Science blog, but it would seem odd. I know Derek doesn’t read this site so I can say what I like about him here. I was at the launch of the Leicester branch of pi-CETL. pi-CETL is a multi-university consortium looking into teaching Physics in innovative ways. It was quite a big do and we had the vice-chancellor in to open the centre. I feel there’s not enough vice in my life, so I would have liked to have talked to him about getting some more, but he was busy. I also got to hear Derek Raine, the brains behind the Leicester section of pi-CETL and I thought he gave a stellar demonstration of the kind of thing that makes Leicester interesting. Derek has a passion for Physics, but that’s no surprise, any lecturer is keen on their own subject. What he also has are passions for the scientific method and passing this on to other people. Those two are rarer.

For instance there are scientists who decide to work with some ancient history or archaeology and end up pulling anything that looks like their interest out of the past. So you end up with gynaecologists who announce that Stonehenge is a giant womb. It tells us nothing about the past only about the researcher. Similarly you get physicists who’ll talk about possible life on other worlds purely in terms of their physical properties without engaging with the biology. Did you know there could be life on the Moon? Someone sneezed on some of the Apollo 11 Surveyor 3 equipment and when Apollo 12 brought a sample back they brough back some Streptococcus mitis which survived on the Moon. It didn’t flourish as far as I know, but life is a lot hardier than many people believe. It came as a shock, at least to physicists, because microbe survival didn’t feature in any of the questions they were asking. One of the things which came out of Derek’s talk was that life gets a lot more interesting when you do things like ask a chemist and a biologist for both of their views on a biochemical process. When he was thinking about making the opening module of the i-Science course about building the pyramids, Derek didn’t just get the bare facts of the pyramids and set about calculating, instead he got a book on Egyptology to see what the Egyptologists were asking about pyramid construction. That makes problems much more interesting because it means the physics problems have a purpose. It’s giving the problems a purpose that in turn makes the course more engaging. It doesn’t just pass along facts and techniques, it also passes along why these techniques are used.

He’s not a solitary figure. I thought I’d blogged on Jeremy Levesley’s Café Scientifique appearance, but it appears to have gone missing. He gave a talk on Maths education. As topics go I’d expect it to be dull, but it was brilliant. He talked about the value of maths and the pointlessness of some maths teaching in schools. He talked about gaps in the education such as probability and statistics which an understanding of is essential to sensibly make many judgements these days. He argued that perhaps we should even consider teaching Numeracy rather than Maths, and he did all this eloquently and with humour. If someone’s willing to question the very basis of what they do to teach better, then it suggests to me that they’re equally innovative in the research questions they ask and that seems to be a common feature in all the i-Science committee.

In the School of Archaeology and Ancient History there’s also been a relatively recent re-vamp of the teaching process. In all these places there’s a clear connection drawn between research as it is happening and what is provided to students to help them evaluate the research. I’m now starting to look for a position at another university for when I complete my PhD. To an extent you go where the work is, so the reason I’m looking now is that I’d rather end up in a department similar to Leicester in attitude if not in content. What can we do with teaching? is a far more interesting question than What’s the minimum I have to provide? I think it’s overly simplistic to say there’s no divide between teaching and research, there clearly is, but it’s not necessarily an opposition. If I teach then I want to do so in a department where teaching will also make me a better researcher.