When I was asking around about teaching methods or topics that excited students, I was particularly intrigued to hear about Dr. Phyllis van Slyck’s course, “Designer Babies/Designing Humans (and the story of American Eugenics)” at LaGuardia Community College.
After emailing Phyllis to ask if she was teaching anything interesting this semester, my curiosity was piqued when I received the following response:
I’ve actually had a great semester teaching eugenics. I came up with assignments that worked really well for first and second year students, like a letter to the editor of the (faux) Indiana Times expressing concern/outrage about the passing of sterilization laws for various groups considered “defective,” including alcoholics, paupers, etc., and a flyer for citizens in a local community warning them of black women being sterilized after giving birth—see Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid. I was focusing on voice and audience and it really worked.
Besides an introductory video on designer babies, the course website poses these questions: “How have scientists, philosophers and other thinkers addressed the issues of improving human genetics? What dangers emerged in the first half of the twentieth century? What ethical issues are we facing today? Do benefits outweigh dangers? Do we need ethical guidelines for decisions about genetic choice?” The website also offers a list of resources for exploring the topic further.
As part of the course, the students read selections from The Case Against Perfection by Michael J. Sandel, Better than Human by Allen Buchanan, and Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington, and watch Gattaca, Transcendence, Never Let Me Go, Ex Machina, and selections from TV shows such as Humans and Black Mirror.
For their final assignment, students can choose between a creative or critical option based on their viewing of Black Mirror episodes. For the creative option, they can write a story about a technology that initially appears to be beneficial but ultimately proves to be harmful. For the critical option, they can choose a technology from one of the Black Mirror episodes and analyze how it initially seems appealing but eventually goes wrong.
Van Slyck teaches the course as part of an Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) at LaGuardia, which places, “10 basic writers in a class of 10-12 college level writers. The basic writers get 3 additional hours of instruction and it’s highly successful (pass rates are double what they were in basic writing). A lot of 2 and 4 year colleges are trying out this program which originated at Baltimore Community College.”
The course asks, “whether or not ‘designer babies’ or ‘genetic enhancements’ have positive benefits as well as the potential to be a form of eugenics.” You may balk at the notion of eugenics still being alive and well without even realizing its existence in our daily lives. As Andrew Solomon writes in Far From the Tree:
The choices are broadening every day. People who believe in the right to opt for healthy, normative children refer to selective abortion; people to whom that idea is anathema refer to commercial eugenics, evoking a world stripped of variety and vulnerability. A vast industry of pediatric medicine implies that responsible parents should revamp their children in various ways, and parents expect doctors to correct their children’s perceived defects: to administer human growth hormone to make the short ones taller, to fix a cleft lip, to normalize ambiguous genitalia. These optimizing interventions are not exactly cosmetic, but they are not necessary for survival. They have led social theorists such as Francis Fukuyama to speak of a ‘post-human future’ in which we will eliminate the variety within mankind.
Fukuyama’s warning still hovered in my mind as I read about van Slyck’s assignment for the students after they screen Ex Machina: They write on the question of whether the robot in the movie, Ava, actually possesses self-awareness, and how self-aware robots might fit into the eugenics movement.
Van Slyck’s syllabus notes that, “A key cultural and philosophical question we will address throughout the course is, who has the right to decide what is desirable, superior, perfect and, conversely, undesirable, inferior, imperfect and therefore expendable? ” Her students discussed the recent news about the Chinese scientist who employed CRISPR technology to delete a gene in embryos before implantation to prevent HIV—resulting in an uprising in the scientific community and a fascinating conversation in van Slyck’s class.
Van Slyck notes that, “there was enthusiasm and commitment to the writing that is not always there when assignments are dry and they don’t know how to develop a voice. Plus it was fun! Mainly they were so excited about this topic (or should I say enraged).” She shares that focusing on a single topic throughout the semester allowed the students to delve more deeply and develop a more layered understanding of the material. This also aids them in their research, giving them a greater sense of ownership over the material and a greater investment. I’ve noticed that students research best when the topic feels like it belongs to them in some way.
Another reason van Slyck believed the topic might feel close to home for some of the students was that, “By the second or third class students started talking about eugenicists’ ideas being not unlike Trump’s position on those Mexican ‘rapists and criminals’ crossing our borders, and his general support of white supremacists (CUNY has a very high immigrant population). It’s another reason this topic went over so well.” In the end, a course the students really feel belongs to them (as well as yielding strong research and writing results) and helps to shed light on their own reality is certainly one to emulate.
This is part of a series, Adventures in Pedagogy. You can read previous essays here:
Teaching Your Students to Become Textual Flâneurs
What I Learned About Teaching College From Being a Parent to Young Kids and Vice Versa
Asking College and High School Students How They Want to be Taught
Pedagogical Resources
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Pedagogy Unbound
The New York Times Learning Network
Academy of American Poets: Teach This Poem
The Derek Bok Center For Teaching and Learning at Harvard
Northwestern Searle Center For Advancing Learning and Teaching
University of Michigan Center For Research on Learning and Teaching