Dr. Ken Alder is currently a Professor in History at Northwestern University in Illinois. He studied physics at Harvard University, where he also received a Ph.D. in the history of science in 1991. His research interests revolve around the study of the history of science in its social and political context. The following paragraph illustrates how he has used materials from the Spoken Word repository to technologically enhance the way that students approach their coursework.

Dr. Ken Alder: “‘One of the goals of my large introductory course on the history of modern science (19th and 20th century) is to give the students the sense that science has been made by people through a contentious process; it is nothing like the placid consensus they find in their science textbooks. The best way to do that is to give them primary sources of science-in-the-making. The use of the BBC audio helped me do that dramatically. For my section on the making of the atomic bomb (based on lectures, a documentary called The Day After Trinity, and various primary written sources), I had them listen to the BBC announcment of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and then a discussion among intellectuals (B. Russell et al) that ensued shortly thereafter about the social and political consequences of the bomb. Students then wrote a one-page reaction paper on: 1) the extent to which the Hiroshima announcement was already attempting to justify the dropping of the bomb 2) the panel members’ argument about whether the bomb would make world govenment inevitable and 3) Russell’s guess that henceforth all young physicists will become state-prisoners…. For the section on the discovery of DNA and its background (based on lectures and Watson’s The Double Helix), I had them write a one-page response piece to Francis Crick’s interview of 1962, there the one-page “reaction” paper was to discuss one of the following themes: reductionism in biology, why physicists entered biology after WWII, the role of funding agencies in shaping the direction of science, the diversity of approaches to scientific collaboration. Both were, I think, extremely successful and popular assignments, giving the students access to a primary source that was nothing like what they had anticipated: science as a messy, complex process.’

See all Spoken Word resources collected by Ken Alder

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