A postmortem on dissection

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Manuscript of chapter published in John Wallace and Bill Louden (eds) (2002) ... I realize that Milne's story is not centrally concerned with the ethical ... boys who 'proceeded to massacre their plants'—but such is the power of narrative allusion ... dissection activities (and I always made it clear that it was their choice) were ...
Manuscript of chapter published in John Wallace and Bill Louden (eds) (2002) Dilemmas of Science Teaching: Perspectives on Problems of Practice (pp. 118-121). London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

A postmortem on dissection Noel Gough Deakin University, Victoria, Australia

Cath Milne introduces her vignette, ‘The flower dissection’, by referring to the White Rabbit—and rabbits invariably remind me of Spike Milligan’s (1979, p. 46) poem, ‘Open heart university’. Dedicated to BBC-TV’s Open University programs, the poem begins as follows: We’ve come a long way said the Cigarette Scientist as he destroyed a live rabbit to show students how it worked. I realize that Milne’s story is not centrally concerned with the ethical dilemmas posed by dissection as such—although there may be a hint of disquiet in her reference to the group of boys who ‘proceeded to massacre their plants’—but such is the power of narrative allusion that I was immediately drawn to revisit questions of the moral defensibility of dissection in schools. Is dissection necessary? Can we justify destroying a living organism ‘to show students how it worked’? Should we tolerate students ‘massacring’ anything—be it a pithed toad or a flower? A related issue concerns the gender-related differences in students’ enthusiasm for dissection to which Milne alludes. In my years as a biology teacher I found that girls were often reluctant to dissect animals whereas boys tended to be much more enthusiastic, wielding their scalpels like samurai swords and overtly or covertly ridiculing the girls for their squeamishness. Later, as a teacher educator visiting student teachers in schools, I found that many teachers (both male and female) would also try to persuade girls to suppress their abhorrence of dissection by modeling or encouraging a dispassionate and clinical approach—for example, it seemed to me that lab coats were more often donned for dissections than for other laboratory activities. I frequently found myself pondering the appropriateness of such tactics. Doubt, suspicion, and even revulsion are perfectly reasonable—and indeed healthy—responses to destroying living things in the name of education. Why would anyone deliberately seek to suppress such feelings in others? In principle, I am no more opposed to dissection for educative purposes than I am to eating meat to satisfy our nutritional needs or epicurean desires. But I also abhor waste, and believe that the decision to kill (or to condone the killing of) another organism should not be taken lightly. I used to keep a colony of hooded rats in my biology classroom—clean and friendly animals that students enjoyed caring for—so that those who chose to participate in dissection activities (and I always made it clear that it was their choice) were not distanced from the experience of killing an animal to satisfy their curiosity about ‘how it worked’. The slightly melancholy mood that usually prevailed during the ensuing dissection classes suggested that students took their complicity in (and personal responsibility for) the rats’ deaths seriously. There were no ‘massacres’ or casual mutilations of the kind I have observed in classes where students were given preserved specimens from biological supply companies. Such specimens are, I believe, indefensible wastes of animals’ lives. Students are not only distanced from the opportunities for moral development that may accompany a more personal encounter with the ethical questions surrounding dissection, but they are also robbed of the sensuous experiences and tacit knowledge that comes with seeing, touching and smelling the insides of an animal that has only just died. Students are likely to learn less from dissecting

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the cold, hard, bloodless and shriveled organs of a preserved rat that stinks of formaldehyde than they are from disassembling a scale model or manipulating a computer simulation. But I would much rather give students the opportunity to feel the warmth and wetness of bodily fluids and soft tissues before rigor mortis sets in, to see the glistening translucence of membranes and mesentery, to unpack the slippery mass of abdominal organs and intestines, and perhaps to reflect a little on whatever they find wondrous or disquieting or ineffable as they expose—and are exposed to—the fleshly embodiments of life’s complexity and transience. All of the above may seem a long way from Cath Milne’s story of a flower dissection, but you can blame her invocation of the White Rabbit for that. And you haven’t heard the end of the Rabbit yet, because I’m enough of a trivialist to note that Milne quotes the Walt Disney movie version of the White Rabbit’s entrance line rather than Lewis Carroll’s (1939 [1865], pp. 13-14) original text in which we are told what Alice was actually contemplating when she was interrupted: She was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid) whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural);… This passage resonates with aspects of Milne’s tale in interesting ways, for Alice is consciously pondering a very similar question to one which teachers and students should be encouraged to attend: is the ‘pleasure’ of dissecting flowers worth the ‘trouble’ of picking them? I trust that it will be clear from my discussion of rat dissection that this is not a rhetorical question: the troubling moral dilemmas of dissection can—and perhaps should— mute the pleasurable aspects of the experience but need not extinguish them. Picking flowers is not lethal to the plants from which they are excised, but I would still prefer living material not to be wasted. Milne writes, ‘I had asked the students to bring some flowers from home so that we could do an activity on dissecting flowers’. If I were in Milne’s position, I would be less disappointed by the observation that, ‘as usual, some students had remembered and some had not’, than by the absence of any response from students that might resemble Alice’s: ‘when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural’. We ought to wonder—and encourage our students to wonder—at much that seems ‘quite natural’ in science classrooms. For example, Milne’s story illustrates the extent to which we have ‘naturalized’ a privileging of science-as-representation over science-as-performance in science education. Milne’s comment on practical activities in her first paragraph is familiar: teachers are usually ‘in favor’ of them but note that they require ‘more time to teach the relevant material’ than ‘chalk and talk’. In other words, the valued outcomes of practical activities are not performance skills but those which can also be represented through ‘chalk and talk’. Milne’s student, Fiona, has similarly naturalized the expectation that the valued outcomes of her flower dissection are not the skilled performances of using specific instruments to assist close observation of a real flower but, rather, the reproduction of a representation of a flower that matches another representation (in this case, the textbook diagram). I would prefer the activity of dissection to be seen as an end in itself, completed when the appropriate parts and structures of the plant or animal are displayed. As Fiona’s

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second drawing demonstrates, a student’s ability to produce a cross-sectional diagram of a flower does not necessarily provide us with evidence that s/he has actually observed it. Milne’s story reminds me that I was not in the habit of asking students to draw diagrams of what they had dissected—though not (at least consciously) for the reasons I would now offer, but because I modeled my approach on that of my own high school biology teacher. For example, he would ask us to use a blunt probe to carefully lift a rat’s ureter from the back wall of the abdomen so that we could trace its path from kidney to bladder and, when he was satisfied with our display, we could move on to the next stage of the dissection. Activities such as dissection may be most worthwhile if they are emphatically empirical— object-oriented ‘experiments’ in the pre-Baconian sense (as in the Latin experimentalis, based on experience not authority or conjecture). The language in which we frame such activities should initially focus students’ attention on their own performances relative to the objects with which they are interacting, and encourage a sense of achievement by reference to demonstration rather than more abstract forms of representation. Of course, as I have argued elsewhere (Gough, 1998), practical work in school science education is always a ‘theatre of representation’, but teachers exert a good deal of control over which representations are privileged through the students’ performances. The mere presence of textbooks as ‘props’ for such performances encourages students to defer to languages of abstraction and authority and discourages them from focusing on their own experience by using their own colloquial languages. One of Jay Lemke’s (1990, p. 172) recommendations for ‘teaching against the mystique of science’ is pertinent here, namely, bridging the gap between colloquial and scientific language by encouraging students to ‘translate back and forth between scientific and colloquial statements or questions’. This sort of translation cannot occur if students are presented too soon with the language of textbooks as the privileged mode of representing their own experiences. Thus, for example, in the conversation between students that Milne reports, Jane and Fiona seem to be moving too hastily from observing and counting ‘those things’ in a Eucalyptus flower to representing them as the ‘stamens’ that are labeled in their textbook. The missing step here is a performance—displaying and counting ‘those things’ to each other and/or the teacher—a performance that needs no textbook or labeled cross-sectional diagram to authorize it.

References Carroll, Lewis [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson]. (1939 [1865]). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London and Glasgow: Collins. Gough, Noel. (1998). ‘If this were played upon a stage’: school laboratory work as a theatre of representation. In Jerry Wellington (Ed.), Practical Work in School Science: Which Way Now?(pp. 69-89). London: Routledge. Lemke, Jay L. (1990). Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Norwood NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Milligan, Spike. (1979). Open Heart University. London: M & J Hobbs in association with Michael Joseph.