Emma Asher

In this series, we speak with instructors who lead different sections of the Core Curriculum to learn what they love about engaging with College students. This month we chat about Frontiers of Science with Amanda Quirk CC’17, a lecturer in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics. She has been teaching in the Core Curriculum for two years as a member of the Columbia Science Fellows program. She earned a Ph.D. in 2022 from UC Santa Cruz.

What is the best part about teaching the Core Curriculum?

For me, it’s being able to interact with students with all different backgrounds, motivations and interest in majors. Typically, if you’re teaching science courses, you’re often only interacting with students who have sorted themselves into a “science” category — and those students are lovely and wonderful, but it’s such a privilege to work with students who have totally different motivations from me. And it also allows me to learn the most from them, too: how they approach problems, how they view the world, but also what really motivates them and why they came to Columbia. I think that being in a space with such a diverse student body is the best learning environment possible, because not only do I get to learn from them, but they get to learn from each other in a way that really enhances their education.

How do you innovate and/or bring your own spin to Frontiers of Science?

At the beginning of every seminar, I show a piece of art that I think has some tie to the specific science that we’re talking about. When students take classes, they go to certain departments — they’re in the chemistry department or the sociology department — and this gives the idea that these fields are separate and in their own little boxes. In reality, when you’re doing research or interacting in the world, that’s not true at all. So I try to show that even these fields that we think are so separate — science and art — do influence each other.

I also want students to know they are welcome and encouraged to bring their own ideas from their own personal interests into class. So, say I’m showing a sculpture or discussing a song or a poem at the beginning of class, that might motivate somebody to talk more about their own connections to what was said in the lecture. And then they can find themselves in it where maybe they wouldn’t have thought that they could. I want students to know that if they want to continue studying science, they could; but even if they don’t, to know that their lives are impacted by science.

What are you teaching that feels especially relevant for this year?

How to fact check; or as we say in Frontiers, how to evaluate claims. We live in this incredible era where there’s so much information and it spreads really easily. Social media and the news cover science like they never did before, and now with AI, you can ask questions and immediately get answers. And this is wonderful, but it means there are so many false claims — either maliciously false, or accidentally false, or half false — that really can disrupt lives and political systems. And so I think it’s such an important skill for students, as they use these tools, to realize that the tools are flawed because they were made by humans. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use them, but once we get an answer, we need to pause and think: Does that make sense? If we see a headline and think that it is biased in any way, do we have the skills to fact check it? I think that’s incredibly important, and it’s something I really would like students to take away from Frontiers. I think Frontiers is uniquely posed as a course to be able to do that.

What has been your favorite Core Curriculum teaching moment?

Because the seminar classes are smaller, there’s a sense of community that forms in the classroom. Once a semester, I take the students to the American Museum of Natural History to see one of the special exhibitions, “Invisible Worlds.” It’s in a fairly large room, and there’s a 10-minute video loop on all of the walls and on the floor that kind of unites all of the units that we study. The students interact with the videos, and it’s fun for me because I can stand back and watch them. There’s this sense of awe that I can see from them as they’re visualizing all these things that we’re talking about. I can see them making connections in their head, and they’re all standing together. It’s a very crowded room, but you can still see them; they’ve worked so hard all semester to develop a community. Seeing students interact outside of campus while still thinking about what they’ve learned is definitely my favorite moment of the semester.