For biologist Dr. Betty Lou Brett, water is for recreation as well as for scientific inquiry.
 

Biology is more, much more, than a textbook and a lab coat.

A biology field trip to Miami University – in the rain.

Biology Is a “Doing Discipline”

Biologist Betty Lou Brett doesn’t view her discipline as a series of book learning tasks.

Rather, it’s a way of looking at the world – an adventure, a quest, and a series of questions that, as tentative answers are worked out, keep leading to other questions.

“Science,” Dr. Brett says, “is a creative human enterprise, not a linear timeline of discoveries made by dispassionate scientists who knew where they were going every step of the way.”

And biology courses “need to show that creativity and serendipity play crucial roles in scientific investigations, that scientists have lots of wrongheaded notions, and that science does not produce the right answers, but rather the best explanations.”

Explanations, she hopes, that will be revised by the work some of her students will someday undertake.

Dr. Brett’s approach of teaching science is “as a way of knowing how the world works.  Too many students see science as a collection of facts.  In reality science is the process of asking questions about how the world works and trying to find the answers to those questions.  It is not the facts that excite scientists, but the process of discovery. Students should experience science.”

And science teachers should “convey relevance in a meaningful way.”

Dr. Brett’s inquiry method approaches biology as an investigative science where “scientific reasoning and experimentation require first-hand experience.”

Such as the three-day biology field trip to Hueston Woods last November (two of those days spent in September weather). Or our two field trips to the Cincinnati Zoo. Or the lab dissection work and experiments work that John Scott Academy’s students are able to do – thanks to Dr. Brett’s faculty status there – at Cincinnati State.

Dr. Brett earned her BA in biology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, her MA in biology (botany) at the University of Michigan, and her PhD in natural resources (population genetics) at the University of Michigan. Her area of concentration is aquatic biology.

Biology, teaching and water. All a part of Dr. Brett’s environment.

“When I took up kayaking about six years ago, my daughter thought that I was obsessed by the sport,” she says. “‘No,’ I say. ‘Kayaking is a part of my obsession with water and the aquatic environment. I am so focused on aquatic biology that I married a man who works on “hard water,” and I have never had a vacation that did not include the ocean, a lake or a stream.”

Dr. Brett met her husband through biology.      “Carlton’s research is on ancient marine organisms and marine environments,” Dr. Brett says. “To most people he is a paleontologist and sedimentologist. To me his research is on petrified mud (hard water) and extinct marine organisms. He prefers salt water organisms; I am partial to fresh water organisms.”

John Overbeck