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Antibiotic-resistant Neisseria: Exciting College Freshmen About Genetics
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This curriculum unit for college freshmen uses a complex and current problem that affects science and society—the antibiotic resistance of the bacterium that causes gonorrhea, a very common sexually transmitted disease—to teach gene expression, natural selection, and other fundamental concepts of biology in a real-world context. Developed by participants in the Teaching Fellows Program of the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching, the unit employs scientific teaching—an approach that reflects the nature of science by encouraging students to actively seek, interpret, and synthesize information rather than to passively memorize facts. The core of the unit is a case study: Students are asked to imagine that they run a public health clinic in Racine, Wisconsin. They must create a multifaceted plan to address the societal, political, and economic issues connected with the emergence of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. The unit, designed for three 50-minute class periods, incorporates a variety of active learning strategies (mini-lectures, group problem solving) and frequent in-class assessments to help students expand their understanding of antibiotic resistance. The online curriculum unit describes learning goals and intended outcomes; it also contains supplemental materials (such as PowerPoints and a podcast). An analysis of the curriculum unit’s success in increasing students’ understanding of complex biological topics is available at CBE Life Sciences Education, an online journal. Other teaching units in the areas of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and molecular biology are also available from the Scientific Teaching Program’s digital library.
Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance
The supplementary teacher materials for this resource include PowerPoint lectures. This slide shows the evolution of antibiotic resistance.
HHMI Professor: Jo Handelsman, Ph.D.
Award Years: 2002, 2006
Summary: Jo Handelsman, Ph.D., is an HHMI Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies the communications networks of microbial communities. Her HHMI-funded educational initiatives include:
- The Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching, which trains scientists to bring the same creativity and rigor to their teaching as they bring to their research through two initiatives:
- The HHMI Teaching Fellows Program, which gives graduate students and postdoctoral fellows opportunities to learn the principles of scientific teaching and mentoring through course work, practical experience, and the development of curricula; and
- The annual HHMI-National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology, which selects some 40 faculty to participate in a five-day workshop in which they develop instructional materials for introductory biology courses.
- The HHMI Undergraduate Research Scholars program, which improves the research experience for students from groups underrepresented in the sciences. The students, selected from a national pool to work in labs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, meet weekly with Dr. Handelsman to discuss their research, interactions with mentors, and careers in biology.
- The creation of a course on the influence of human diversity on the way students learn and are treated by their instructors. The goal is to educate future teachers about the role diversity plays in the classroom and to create teaching materials to help instructors address diversity issues in biology courses.
- The development of a “cohort model” for summer research programs that will attempt to ease the transition of undergraduates who are members of minority groups to graduate school at predominantly majority-serving universities; and
- The creation of materials for a capstone undergraduate seminar, Science and Technology in Society.