Rationale
Oak Grove High School offers forensics as a college-preparatory laboratory science course, typically for eleventh and twelfth graders. My students become part of the “behind-the-scenes” science of popular shows such as CSI and Criminal Minds. Besides television series, the increasing violent crime rate of San José and newer variations of cyber-crimes make forensics directly applicable to the lives and communities of our students. Forensics additionally offers previews of several careers that may stem from each of our curricular units: crime scene reconstruction, investigation, crime scene photography, medical examination, pathology, entomology, medico-legal perspectives, cryptology, and more. The application of current, local news invites students to engage and advocate for authentic investigation for the science of the justice system.
The goal of my unit is to teach my students about natural variation in insect populations by using various teaching strategies that extend student skills. The current problem with some of the preferred lessons about evolution, although rich in content and strong in reliability, is that they use whales, finches, peppered moths, and microbes. With these examples, students often only see images, occasionally manipulate models, or observe samples through a microscope while using pre-published field and laboratory reports. While this is educationally sound and exciting to those who are already interested, these creatures still remain intangible to students regardless of how well they exemplify the effects of evolution in action. Insects are easily examined in their natural environments and students can observe variation within the population on a macroscopic level. Insects also have this special role in forensics because they have abundant species varieties, which perform specific activities and are found in different geographic areas.
A secondary goal of this unit is to comfort those who argue that teaching evolution is controversial because some teachers might face resistance from students, families, and communities. Ample evidence exists to prove the mechanisms of evolution and the observed occurrence of the process itself. Presenting evolution as an idea at odds with religion erroneously supports that they are mutually exclusive, whereas that is not the case. They populate separate realms of thinking, as articulated by the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould in his introduction to the essay Nonoverlapping Magisteria, “Science and religion are not in conflict, for their teachings occupy distinctly different domains.”1
Lastly, learning and teaching evolution must be directly useful to career options. Insects conveniently exist everywhere relevant to students. By fostering an appreciation for insects, this unit opens avenues for career exploration even beyond the sciences. Alternative career paths besides forensic entomology include preparing students for a future study of legal aspects of the insect trade, art/photography using insects, and public policy about the control of insect populations that threaten agriculture or that vector transmit viruses and other pathogens.
By the end of the unit, students will be able to categorize insects by taxonomic order and articulate that the importance of insects in forensics is due to their speciosity – the quality of having an abundance of species. The ability to complete these tasks depends on learning about evolutionary processes by meeting objectives derived from the Next Generation Science Standards, as will be described in the last section of this curricular unit.
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