SUBJECT: Teaching histology in non-majors course
DATE: 1/96

Hello everyone. For all time we have done a basic human histology
laboratory in our non-majors, human biology laboratory at Florida
International University. With every passing semester, I see less and less
interest, application, and motivation for this material. I fail to see the
long-term relavance of English students being able to identify
pseudostratified columnar epithelium.

Do any of you still do tissues in your non-majors labs? Have any of you
dropped it (and how do you feel about doing that?)? I think I could do a
much better service to our students with a nutrition or HIV lab.

Thanks

Thomas Pitzer Office: OE 296 Phone: (305) 348-1224
Instructor/Coordinator Undergraduate teaching Fax: (305) 348-1986
Internet: pitzert@servms.fiu.edu
Florida International University Dept. Biological Science--OE 246
University Park Miami, FL 33199
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


To Tom Pitzer's question: and for me a real leading question about the
functionality of histology in non-majors biology.

Doing histology takes a lot of discipline. Many students today lack discipline
. What one has to do to teach histo is to give the student a frame of
reference when looking at the tissue. I like to give students both normal
and some path examples. Of course I also have students build 3-D images
in the computer of histological features (this the gimme part of the comment).

I could say much more but being a digital kind of histology guy but I will
bite my tongue for now.

Blystone currently in Philadelphia

**********************
ROBERT V. BLYSTONE PHONE:(210)736-7243
DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY FAX:(210)736-7229
Trinity University E-Mail:RBlyston@Trinity.edu
715 Stadium Drive
San Antonio, TX, 78212


We don't do tissues anymore, but how about making your exercise more
relevant by (for example) tying an examination of skin with the ozone/UV
radiation/incidence of skin cancer problem? Non-majors will be more
interested if they feel what they're studying has relevance to their lives -
and the ozone problem looms for all of us. And given that you're in
Florida, your students will relate to deviations from "normal" skin pathology.

Greg Anderson
Department of Biology
44 Campus Ave.
Bates College
Lewiston, ME 04240
ganderso@bates.edu
(207)786-6110


Yes, we still do an animal tissues lab in the non-majors course. It's the
first lab of our second-semester course. When I re-wrote the lab several years
ago I took the approach of illustrating tissue functions by giving examples of
what happens when tissues are worn out or damaged by disease to try to add
relevance. When I thought about eliminating the lab altogether, I realized
that much of the information was essential to the approach taken in other
labs, for example looking at muscle contraction and intestinal structure.

We're now in the process of converting the second semester to investigative
labs, and the old animal tissues lab makes a nice contrast. While students in
traditional labs are looking at slides and sketching tissues and wondering
why, students in the new labs are measuring their reaction times and knee
reflexes. (Unfortunately, the second traditional lab is pretty fun, and
that's when investigative students have their first report assigned.)

Jean Dickey
dickeyj@clemson.edu


Hello Thomas,

We used to have a histology segment in our introductory lab. We dropped it
when the format of the lab changed completely to stress experimental design.
However, I would argue that there is value to histology if, in my opinion,
it is taught from the perspective of structure-function relationships. In
particular, I found and used a book that presented histology in a brand new
way. I've listed the book and chapter headings below:

"Cells and Tissues - An Introduction to Histology and Cell Biology"
by Andrew W. Rogers
Academic Press, 1983
ISBN 0-12-593120-4

Chap 1: Why study histology?
Chap 2: The techniques available
Chap 3: The anatomy of the cell
Chap 4: Epithelia: the body's limits
Chap 5: Connective tissue: the spaces in between
Chap 6: How to look at a section
Chap 7: The blood
Chap 8: Immunity against foreign material
Chap 9: Contraction and muscle
Chap 10: Harnessing contraction to produce movement
Chap 11: A look at tubes
Chap 12: Communication systems
Chap 13: The life and death of cells
Chap 14: The small intestine
Chap 15: Interpretating structure
Chap 16: What have we achieved?

The thrust of this book is that histological can be studied from a logical
departure point - e.g., "first principles" of tissue organization. You can
see from the chapter headings that this book is not written in the
traditional way that most histology texts are. It is realatively short -
about 240 pages - and easily read by students in one semester. I found that
our students enjoyed learning about pathological structure and that this
seemed to give some real purpose to looking at normal structure. Hope this
helps.

George

George Edick
RPI - Dept. Biology
Troy, NY 12180
edickg@rpi.edu


I do one lab, asking them to look at, sketch, and label nine tissues
(squamous epithelial, ciliated columnar epith., cuboidal epith., hyaline
cart., bone, adipose, striated muscle, blood and nervous). I do this in
conjunction with the rest of the lab that deals with some elementary bone
identification and system identification (which cavity, fuction, etc.).
This lab is sort of introductory, and comes right after a microscope lab.

While I certainly agree that and English major does not need to know much
about histology, I think it important that they know a small bit about the
diversity of cells by actually seeing them. It is also kind of fun to
mention that the cilia on cells lining the air passage ways are the first
thing to go when people smoke, and those normal looking cheek cells look a
whole lot like normal cervical cells taken from a Pap smear.

I certainly agree that a nutritionb lab or an HIV lab especially, would be
great. Let me know if you have one you can share.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
ED BURLING
DeAnza College
E-mail: eb04124@tiptoe.fhda.edu
Tel: (408) 864-8625
Cupertino, CA 94014


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