An organized observation of the natural world

November 30, 2023

While I would like to think that I am always actively thinking about how my courses fit into what students learn at Xavier, when the CAS Associate Deans asked me to write a blog entry about lab courses, it called me to reflect again on the importance of this unique course type. I ended up with two main points: how lab courses fit into the liberal arts, and how they validate students in a unique way.

One important purpose of the core is to experience the multitude of ways in which humanity learns. In university courses we read the works of scholars and authors, study cases and examples, contemplate our own inner thoughts, reflect on works of art, and carefully and deliberately observe the natural world in an organized fashion. It is this last one that requires a laboratory experience, the hands-on, scientific measuring of our world. It only here that students not only learn about science, but also learn what it is to do science. Just as a student can’t learn literature without the experience of reading books, the learning the nature of science requires the experience of experimentation and measurement.

This first-hand contact with the natural world lets lab courses validate student work in an objective manner, independent of the teacher’s approval. Here success or failure is decided not by the stroke of the grader’s pen, but by the laws of nature themselves. Students know first-hand if they have done a process correctly, giving them a satisfaction in their own work, not in the external validation granted by our approval. Just as the verdict of a ball passing through goalposts is infinitely more satisfying that the call of a foul by a referee, knowing they have done well by the objective natural laws is superior to a subjective grade on an exam or paper, or even agreement with an exam key. And often in the lab experience, the answer to failure is figuring out what went wrong and correcting it, again not to the satisfaction of the teacher, but to meet what they measure themselves. Failure is a step to success, with us in the role of guide, not merely evaluator.

Dr. Greg Braun
Senior Teaching Professor, Physics