Technologies of Immortality: Team Teaching

I've mentioned it a few times around here, but this semester I've been team-teaching an Honors course. Our Honors program made some big changes over the last few years; one of them was that Honors students would take classes called "Dialectics," where professors from three different colleges would teach a course on a common topic; these could be called "Where Did We Come From?", "Where Are We Now?", and "Where Are We Going?"

I applied to become an Honors fellow back in Spring 2020; the Honors program then arranged a big Zoom meeting where accepted faculty gave quick verbal indications of what they might be interested in. I was interested in science fiction, of course; my argument was that I could basically pair with any science professor, because no matter what science you talk about, there are science fiction stories about it.

I ended up paired with Ryan Cragun, a professor of sociology, and Kenyon Evans-Nguyen, a professor of forensic science who specializes in neurochemistry. We kibbitzed and eventually came up with a "Where Are We Going?" class about what I came to call "technologies of immortality": attempts to lengthen the human lifespan. Our three big examples were consciousness uploading, cryonics, and genetic life extension. I could talk about how such technologies had been depicted in sf, Cragun could talk about the real people trying to do this and the sociological implications of doing it, and Kenyon could talk about the actual science of it.

Like I said, this was Spring 2020... we ended up being scheduled to teach the class in Spring 2024, so I had quite a lot of time to prepare! I've chronicled some of that process here on my blog. In next week's post, I'll talk about my specific stories, but here I wanted to talk about the big picture of how we organized the course.

We bookended the course with the science fiction; the first three weeks were largely mine. Aside from the syllabus day, we began with the story "Bridesicle" by Will McIntosh, as a way of capturing students' attention with the course topic; the story features both cryonics and consciousness uploading. We then did one day on real attempts to extend life, to show this was something really happening, and then went back into the sf.

After that, we shifted to the sociology and the science. The students started learning about how neurons actually worked from Kenyon and about the sociological issues from Cragun. These Dialectics classes have sixty students, and you can't really take sixty students into the lab. So what we would sometimes do is split the class up into thirds: one third would go into the lab, one third would attend a sociology lecture, and one third would conference with me about papers. Across a M/W/F week, students would rotate through all three.

In the lab, they did things like:

• measure electrical activity in crickets
• drug crickets and see how that affected their electrical activity
• measure electrical activity in worms
  
• cool worms and see how that affected their electrical activity
• freeze onion slices in liquid nitrogen

"Dad, why are you a scientist?" asked my five-year-old.

I didn't always get to go (sometimes I had to conference), but I did do three of the labs.

We did a week on HeLa cells, where we had students watch The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and then Cragun talked about the racial issues, Kenyon talked about using HeLa cells during his postdoc (before the book came out, so he didn't know the significance), and I assigned an sf short story that riffed on them.

We also had them read a bit of Gregory Benford's cryonics thriller Chiller, specifically the afterword, where he discusses if he thinks cryonics will work, and we had them research and present on his assumptions.

Finally, at the end of the semester, we circled back to science fiction with two final weeks.

Some Dialectics faculty have the student do common assignments; we broke the grade into four categories, each worth 25%:

• Literature Assignments. I assigned a four-page literary analysis paper near the beginning of the semester, and a 1½-page "reflective" paper near the end, where they had to connect the sf to something from the sociology or science portions of the course.
• Lab Assignments. Kenyon assigned five lab write-ups to go with his five labs.
• Sociology Assignments. Cragun assigned a cumulative sociology research project, where they gathered survey data about attitudes toward immortality, and contextualized it in terms of a literature review they did.
  
• Quizzes and Presentations. I did random reading quizzes, and Kenyon assigned pre-lab quizzes.

I'll talk more about some of this in a future post, too.

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Overall, I liked it a lot. If nothing else, Honors students are engaged and thoughtful, and I got to discuss literature as literature, not as a thing to write about in an AWR course.

Plus, it's fun to learn things! I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't believe that, and for a few weeks, I got to be a student again, learning about neurons and macromolecules and the history of religion and income inequality. I made some neat connections between my work and their work.

But I also really liked working with both Ryan Cragun and Kenyon Evans-Nguyen; I think we have similar dispositions and worked well as co-teachers. They are, like me, nerdy middle-aged dads! I am trying to convince them both to join my Star Trek Adventures campaign. I can imagine there would be some people you would be miserable team teaching with, but I really enjoyed working with the two of them. (Which is good, because we will do it two more times!)