Biennial meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB)

Panel discussion: Making educational sense of “new biology’s” philosophical significance

Presentation: Integrating agency in evolution education: a dangerous idea or a path to deeper learning?

In an effort to tackle a range of student misconceptions, evolution education research and practice has been largely focused on inhibiting agential reasoning – such as invoking organism goals and behaviors as causal factors in evolutionary outcomes, as antagonistic to reasoning about the decentralized processes of evolutionary adaptation. However, the role of organism agency in evolutionary outcomes has been reconsidered by evolutionary biologists in recent decades. We suggest that this agential perspective offers new potential and implications for evolution education research and practice. On the one hand, one might think that the agential perspective introduces unnecessary, even “dangerous”, complexity, confusing students and further strengthening their already existing agential biases. On the other hand, the agential perspective might offer pathways for helping students and teachers think and communicate more clearly about the scientifically adequate role of agency in specific evolutionary outcomes. Including organism agency in evolution education may also have the potential to better integrate evolution across the biology curriculum. Thus, we argue that the field of evolution education needs to engage in these questions: Should, and if so how, the concept of agency be explicitly engaged in biology education? What might be the costs and benefits of doing so, and what might be the costs and benefits of not doing so? Furthermore, adequate agential reasoning plays a role in subjects beyond biology. Thus, a broader question emerges how educators across subjects should deal with concepts that are not fully “owned” by a specific subject. To begin exploring these questions, we developed an assessment tool that aims to identify students’ ability to flexibly and adequately integrate the role of organism agency across selected cases of evolutionary adaptation. Our results highlight that the agential perspective has potential in evolution education and point to future directions in educational research and practice.