Bruce Johnson, left, senior research associate, and Robert Wyttenbach, right, postdoctoral researcher, flank Ronald Hoy, professor of neurobiology and behavior, as he holds up a crawfish the invertebrate the educators are promoting as the ideal experimental animal for standard neuroscience instruction. Charles Harrington/University Photography
Neurobiology educators at Cornell, through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), are working to spread the word about a new way to teach standard neuroscience that they say is simple, cheap and proven to work.
Using a three-part approach, Ronald Hoy, professor of neurobiology and behavior, and Bruce Johnson, senior research associate in neurobiology and behavior, hope to influence teachers of physiology, neuroscience and biology at the college and even the high school level to use a new set of laboratory exercises they say are "teacher-friendly" and inexpensive. This new curriculum is built around the invertebrate Hoy and Johnson say is the ideal experimental animal the crayfish. They would like to see the crayfish become the standard neuroscience teaching instrument accessible to all students.
Hoy is a strong proponent of the use of crayfish in the laboratory. He started using crayfish while doing his graduate research work at Stanford, and ever since he has been promoting the crayfish as ideal for laboratory teaching. "It has been proven to work, easy to learn, environmentally sound and cheaper than the frog, turtle, rat or rabbit," he said. "From the dissection standpoint, there is no pithing, the crayfish is user-friendly and expandable so you can use the same one for the entire semester. The labs combine structure and function of the neural systems, so they are conceptually rich, yet technically simple. Overall, the labs lend themselves to quantitative thinking and take advantage of the fact of the unity of neural function.
"The neuronal computations that lead to behavioral changes are similar, whether they are occurring in the crayfish or the brain of a college freshman," Hoy said.
Hoy and Johnson will instruct teachers on how to use these exercises by continuing a series of summer workshops in teaching laboratories at Cornell, by producing an instructional CD-ROM of the exercises that will be nationally distributed, and by setting up an electronic bulletin-board service that will permit them to stay in close contact with any teacher who is using, or wants to use, the teaching modules in his or her own laboratory and permits the teachers to chat among themselves.
During "Camp Crawdad," Hoy and Johnson's instructional workshop at Cornell this summer, faculty from a dozen small liberal arts colleges had five days of intensive instruction learning these new techniques with the help of Jennifer Bestman, a Cornell graduate student, and two Cornell undergraduates, Dipayan Chaudhari and Thomas Oliver. For the second year running, the camp received glowing reviews from participants.
"As opposed to textbooks, we provided an element of human contact to teach basic techniques," said Oliver, a senior college scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences who is concentrating in neurobiology and behavior. "We walked them through every step of the way."
Hoy said that he and Johnson have acted locally but have thought globally in promoting the teaching method. "We aim to affect a lot of people, because the 12 participants we have had each year will teach at their respective schools what we have taught them," he said. "If each participant teaches a class of 30, the multiplier effect is very strong."
Hoy hopes that with the help of Robert Wyttenbach, Cornell postdoctorate specialist in neurobiology, the making of a CD-ROM will solidify their goal of making a widespread impact. The CD-ROM to be finished by next summer will condense the exercises of Camp Crawdad and add narration and graphics. Hoy said that he would like its price to be within the financial reach of any teaching institution. An NSF grant also will cover the making of a video of the lab exercises that Hoy is hopeful will be completed by November.
"The CD-ROM is particularly relevant here on campus," said Hoy, "because of the recent announcement that Cornell will begin a project based on remote instruction, the goal of which is to put Cornell courses and seminars online to provide virtual classrooms anywhere there's an uplink or Internet connection. We believe that our project is one more example of what can be done."
Though the electronic bulletin board is only in its beginning phases, Hoy believes a "virtual crawdad community" will grow when people can share in their common experiences.
"This is the modern way to spread knowledge and information since networking leads to collaboration on everything from lecture notes to sharing equipment, the costs of which can be very high," Oliver added. "These smaller institutions with limited budgets can really benefit from this."