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DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: Students come in with opinions already,
and they can say things in a seminar that
are based upon just their common knowledge
and not based on the readings.
CURT NEWTON: Today on Chalk Radio,
we're exploring global food production, water, and climate
change, and the challenge of teaching
when polarized opinions come to class.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: I'd say generally,
the students learn that most of these issues
are more subtle and complex than they thought
when they came in the class.
So one of the things that happens at the end of the class
is, people's opinions are usually not
as polarized as they were in the beginning.
CURT NEWTON: I'm Curt Newton, your guest host
for this episode of Chalk Radio.
At MIT, officially, I'm director of MIT OpenCourseWare.
But for so many years at MIT and in my personal life,
I'm also doing a lot of work on climate change.
So when Sarah Hansen, your usual host,
lined up this episode dealing with these issues that
are so deeply personal for me around climate change, food
systems, and water, and gave me the chance to join in,
I jumped at it.
With prolonged droughts made worse by climate change
affecting food production and ecosystems
all around the world, this conversation
couldn't be more timely.
Our guest, Dennis McLaughlin, is a professor in MIT'S Civil
and Environmental Engineering department,
and he's the instructor for Course 1.74 Land, Water, Food,
and Climate.
Professor McLaughlin's interest in hydrology and what
it can tell us about our food systems
has been years in the making.
It all started back in 1991 on a research trip that took him
halfway around the world.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: I went to Australia.
And there were a lot of discussions
at the time about what was sustainable food production
and whether or not Australia could grow more food
with limited water and the connection
between the availability of water and the population
and food supply.
It struck me as a really interesting application area
for hydrology.
CURT NEWTON: Dennis explained that some
of the big wheat-growing areas were becoming reliant
on irrigation to supplement natural rainfall with water
pumped from underground in order to keep
the crop big and healthy.
But over time, all that irrigation
causes salts to build up in the soil.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: You could go out in the fields
and see near the irrigation ditches
just white layers of salt accumulating.
It's the same kind of problem that
ruined Mesopotamian civilization millennia ago.
And it wasn't like it was a big surprise.
But there was not really a good mechanism
to encourage farmers to hold back on their irrigation.
There was a lot of interest in changing regulations
and incentives for farmers to have
less adverse environmental impact, especially
with salinity, and to make sure that there was enough water
to keep the agriculture economy healthy and going.
I mean, it's not a reasonable solution
to say we won't have any more farming,
and therefore we won't have salt accumulation, and so on.
So it's that balance between sustainable
use and economically productive use that's tricky.
CURT NEWTON: This experience in Australia
led to the creation of a course on water usage and agriculture
and food systems.
It was here where Professor McLaughlin recognized
that teaching these topics can bring about an extra challenge.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: One of the interesting things about
the course, and a challenging thing as a teacher,
is a lot of the topics we talk about--
sort of like talking about climate change, or GMOs,
or food waste, or vegetarianism--
students come in with opinions already.
And they can say things in a seminar that
are based upon just their common knowledge
and not based on the readings.
So for example, in GMOs, the focus of most
of the students is, oh, would GMOs hurt me?
Human health-- are they going to cause me to have cancer
or whatever?
And that's really not the scientific perspective
so much in GMOs, because there's almost zero
evidence that any GMOs are harmful to human health.
And they learn that by reading the papers.
The problem is, what do they do to the ecosystem,
and what do they do to other plants
that are not genetically manipulated,
and what are the unintended consequences of GMOs,
because GMOs are generally designed to help the farmer be
more productive.
One of the things that happens at the end of the class is
people's opinions are usually not
as polarized as they were in the beginning.
CURT NEWTON: In my own work on climate change,
I've certainly had this experience
of trying to have conversations with people coming out
of polarized opinions and preconceived notions.
I was really curious to hear how Dennis
moved beyond that in this class and helped the students have
more productive conversations to view
these sometimes controversial issues from multiple angles.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: It's really just an introductory course.
And it's to kind of stimulate interest
that they had when they came in and show them
that it is possible to pursue difficult topics by going
to the literature.
Many of them aren't used to reading scientific papers,
the undergraduates especially.
They're used to being lectured to
and things being in textbooks.
CURT NEWTON: And here's where Dennis McLaughlin
gets creative.
For each article he assigns, a student
is asked to present that article to the class.
But Dennis also gives a specific prompt to make sure
that these presentations actually
help the students understand the material.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: Another challenge in the course
is to make sure that their presentations don't
bore the other students.
So I said, you just have a minute or two,
and you should pose some questions
for the class or some issues and make them
as controversial as possible.
So that's what we try to do.
CURT NEWTON: As controversial as possible?
Wouldn't encouraging controversy just
prevent us from moving beyond polarized opinions?
Dennis went on to explain why controversy really
is productive and important to deal with, especially
in science and engineering classrooms.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: Another thing they're not
used to, the students, even some of the graduate students,
is scientific controversy.
There's perhaps not that much controversy, ironically,
interestingly, about GMOs.
But there's a lot of controversy about things
like organic farming and whether or not
we should be willing to sacrifice yield a bit
to have more sustainable agriculture.
And one of the things we find out in the class
is, many people who are organic farming advocates
are out of the mainstream of the scientific literature.
But when you review the papers on the other side that say,
for example, it's silly to try to continue
smallholder farming in Africa.
Africa's agricultural future should
be large, industrial farms, perhaps run by foreigners
who buy or lease the land.
Some people write assessments like that.
And you say, well, yeah, but they're
being funded by the large agricultural industry.
Well, does that mean they're wrong?
Are they biased?
Well, I don't know.
But they become advocates, too.
So the students read the papers, and we
try to discuss both sides of an argument based on the merits.
And I'm not saying students don't get exposure
to that kind of thing elsewhere.
But if they're taking physics, and we're
talking about Newton's law, it's not presented as a controversy.
CURT NEWTON: Motivating students to engage
with the scientific literature to unpack controversies
is only part of the work involved in teaching
this engineering course.
There's something else, too, something really important.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: It's a challenge
to decide how much effort and discussion
to spend on learning about scientific issues,
scientific controversies, more or less agreed-on facts,
and how much to spend on things like values,
because you really can't talk about smallholder farming
unless you talk about poverty.
You can ask questions as to why is the smallholder farmer so
poor?
Why does the smallholder kids not want to stay on the farm?
They want to go to the city.
What do they do in the city?
Are there jobs there?
Well, do they have any education?
Well, no, because the smallholder farmer
doesn't have enough money to send the child to school.
What about the role of women in farming
and the role of cultural differences
in how women are viewed?
And can they, for example, participate in ownership?
You could just spend the whole semester
talking about this stuff.
CURT NEWTON: Dennis's course attracts students
from a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds.
And it's this diversity of experiences among the students
that enriches the class for everyone, including Dennis.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: I had a student
in the last class who was an art student at Mass College of Art.
And she knew almost nothing about engineering or science,
but she came from Venezuela and settled in Puerto Rico,
and her aunt is a farmer.
And so she talked about how hard it was for Puerto Rican farmers
to be competing with Central American farmers, who
were very poor, who were exporting
produce to Puerto Rico.
So Puerto Rico, this place where you
can grow food all the time, this very productive climate,
is not producing much food for its own residents because
of pricing.
And she actually brought that to the class and talked about it.
And I wouldn't have even thought about it.
So there's this interaction between the students who
have had farming experience or just a student from Puerto Rico
who's talking to one from Philadelphia,
and they're both from cities, but they have a much different
perspective.
So not only did the other students
learn from these students, but I learned from them.
CURT NEWTON: As you may have picked up by now,
climate change is an important topic in this course.
We asked Dennis how climate change will
affect food and agriculture.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: Well, that sounds like a question
we could pose in the class.
And we do discuss it through reading papers.
So this is a big topic and a controversial one.
One thing that there seems to be pretty good agreement on
is if climate change increases temperatures
during the growing season sufficiently, that
will hurt agriculture.
But it depends on the crop, depends on the place.
It's a lot different talking about small increases
in average temperature versus large increases
that could actually reduce yield or even kill crops.
So temperature extremes probably won't help.
CURT NEWTON: This course really pushes its participants
to look beyond their own assumptions.
Questions, contradictions, uncertainties--
those are inevitable when we take on topics as complex
as food, water, and climate change.
Professor McLaughlin embraces that
questioning as a core part of the class,
even as he tries to provide some answers.
DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN: Especially undergrads, they're
used to going into class and thinking they're learning,
quote, facts, and that's the end of the story.
But I view the teacher as kind of adjusting, resetting
the discussion to keep things kind of on track
and consistent with the papers.
But giving the students the freedom to say silly things
or to go beyond the scope of the paper
is part of why they like the course.
When they learned that there are differences of opinion,
even among experts and that there
are values, value judgments, and that there's
social equity, and all kinds of things--
they don't even connect that, really, with formal education.
But it's not so easy because, for one thing,
it takes the students off balance a bit.
So it's definitely an art, and you learn it
over multiple times.
You can't just start the very first year
and be perfect on it.
So you have to learn the teaching style as well
as the content.
You have to teach yourself how to be observant to what works
and what doesn't.
CURT NEWTON: Maybe we could all take a page or two
from Professor McLaughlin and his students
and get a little more comfortable
being knocked off balance.
Dennis' perspective made me wonder how other educators
handle similar situations.
How do you integrate conversations
about values and culture into your science and engineering
courses in a way that feels balanced?
You can share your insights via the link in the show notes.
And we'll pass them along to MIT faculty and listeners, who
could incorporate your ideas into their teaching.
If you're interested in learning more
about Professor McLaughlin's work
or teaching with his open educational resources,
you can check out his course, 1.74 Land, Water, Food,
and Climate, on our MIT OpenCourseWare website.
It's one of over 150 courses in OCW's extensive environment
courses collection.
And for even more, check out the MIT Climate website
at climate.MIT.edu, where you'll find a wealth of material
spanning these topics and more.
Thank you so much for listening.
Until next time, signing off from Cambridge, Massachusetts,
I'm Curt Newton from MIT OpenCourseWare.
Chalk Radio's producers include Sarah Hansen, Brett Paci,
and Dave Lishansky.
Scriptwriting assistance from Nidhi Shastri.
Show notes for this episode were written by Peter Chipman.
We're funded by MIT Open Learning and supporters
like you.
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