Diabetes in an Undergraduate Class

Abstract

I am an undergraduate teacher and that is what my first love has been. Over the years, learning from others as well as by my own experience, I could figure out that the best method to teach concepts in science to the young minds is the method of doubt and challenge. Doubting and challenging everything that a textbook has or a class teacher says pay large dividends. This way, students learn inferential logic, nature of evidence, experimental designs, hypothesis testing, alternative interpretations, resolving between alternative interpretations, and the required openness of mind to do so in a much more robust and sound way than the conventional “textbook as bible” approach. In the doubt and challenge approach, students are encouraged to contest prevalent concepts and come up with alternative interpretations of the same experiments and data on which the textbook concepts are based. Further, if any of their alternative interpretations look promising even at a speculative level, they are encouraged to suggest experiments that could distinguish between the conventional and alternative explanations of the phenomenon. In order to satisfy ourselves we then have to go beyond textbooks and explore what is happening in that field currently, see whether the experiments that we visualized have been done or are being done anywhere and, if so, what they imply. Most often, the textbook “wins,” but not uncommonly we identify significant gaps in the knowledge, some logical inconsistencies that need to be addressed, many unanswered questions, and more frequently many unquestioned answers! It is just too common to find that although the frontiers of research are expanding rapidly, some simple fundamental questions remain not only unanswered but knowingly or unknowingly trivialized and ignored.