STSS in Teaching

My own study of STSS has influenced the way I engage with the material in courses that I have taught, both as a teaching assistant and as an instructor of record. I hope that my own broadened knowledge of the social impacts of science and technology has influenced the way that my students view these subjects as well.

COM 302 The Social Impacts of Information Technology

This course engages questions about the social construction of science and technologies by teaching students that the information technologies we engage with every day – social media platforms, search engines, cell phones, music streaming, etc. – are not politically or socially neutral artifacts. Students learn that things like algorithms that are often invisible and perceived as technologically neutral are in fact often embedded with biases simply because they are designed by people, and people are biased. As an instructor in this course, it has been incredibly interesting to see how students think about the technologies they use on a daily basis, and how their opinions of those technologies seem to change by the end of the course. More than any other course I have taught, this one engages with STSS questions in a direct way to show students that technologies are socially constructed, and that thinking about that social construction matters.

COM 330 The Rhetoric of Science

As in instructor of record, I had the opportunity to teach a rhetoric of science course that combined much of what I have learned as a rhetorician with what the STSS certificate program has taught me. In this class, my ultimate goal was to teach students that though science is often publicly represented as a neutral and objective set of practices designed at discovering universal truths about the natural world, in practice it is much more complex and much less objective. Students engaged with questions about the power of language in the construction of scientific findings, learning that the way we talk about things influences the way we perceive and engage with those things. As an instructor this course also afforded me the opportunity to intentionally integrate STSS scholarship into a rhetoric course in an effort to show students the ways in which science and technology are embedded within our lives and social structures.

COM 468 Media Ethics  

In this journalism course, I was able to use my knowledge of STSS scholarship to teach students that not only do their words matter, but the way they use those words online matters too. I taught students that the platforms they use to find and share news are algorithmically curated in less-than-objective ways, and that the way young journalists engage with these platforms and sorting systems is essential, especially as they continue to develop over the coming years. Moreover, my students and I discussed the ways in which technologically-driven data journalism should be considered a technological practice. Finally, we discussed the idea that data itself should be questioned critically, especially as a part of journalistic practice.