Teaching Science and Shalom in the Classroom

Welcome back to the studios of Multnomah University. This is Aline and Renee, your hosts of MU Talks, welcoming you again on a new episode of MU Talks. And I am just very thankful today that we get to share another very powerful voice from our community of just an excellent voice from our community, one of our professors, Renee.

Yes. Today on MU Talks, we welcome Dr. Sarah Gall. Sarah is a professor of biology here at Multnomah University and her academic training is in cell biology. But at Multnomah, she gets to teach a range of biology courses to Multnomah students. Sarah, thanks for coming on.

Welcome. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, we're really glad that you're here. Well, can we start today by just getting to know you a little bit? Can you tell us, when did you fall in love with science? Why is science what you've pursued?

That's kind of a funny question. I come from a long line of scientists on my dad's side of the family, both my grandfather was a chemist, my grandmother was a zoologist, and my dad was a chemist as well. And on my mom's side of the family, it's a bunch of engineers. Wow. And it wasn't till I was in.

College that I thought about, those are some organized parties. Those are some really organized, neat parties. Family parties.

But it was in college. I actually started college as an English and French double major and it was.

You were a rebel in your family?

I know my brother's a newspaper reporter, so he's more of the rebel than I am. But yeah, it was after my first year, I was on a mission trip and was speaking with one of the leaders from our church and she asked what I was majoring in and I said, well, it was English, but I think it's going to be biology. And I think that surprised me as much as her. So after that I was a biology major. Wow. Wow.

And you just stuck with it?

I stuck with it. And I had AP credit for my introductory biology classes. So my first college biology class was a 300 level cell biology class which was over my head and worked my tail off for the B I got. But it fascinated me.

What fascinates you most about cell biology?

All the little things that happen inside of our cells. We've got, you know, 30, 40,000 proteins inside of our cells doing all the stuff they do, keeping us alive, and we don't have to tell them to do it.

40,000 proteins?

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

And they all work together.

They all work together.

Okay.

Most of the time.

Wow.

Most of the Time.

I think realizing that any of us are even remotely healthy and that things work as they should most of the time is pretty miraculous given the number of pieces and parts. Wow.

Have you always studied science in a faith based setting?

No, this is the first faith based school I've been in. So my undergraduate university was church affiliated, but it really didn't trickle down into the classroom. There was a loose affiliation with a denomination, but where I did my graduate work was a secular school. And then where I taught before coming here, for the first six months I taught there, it was a Catholic school and then it became a secular for profit university, actually.

Okay, wow. So then. But then you decided at some point to come to Multnomah and to integrate faith into your teaching. Can you tell me about why that was important to you?

It wasn't actually something I'd thought about a lot until I went to an intervarsity conference in Chicago for faculty. It was about 2010 maybe. And that was the first time I'd really seen people actually systematically putting faith and science and other academic disciplines together. It just had never really crossed. Crossed my mind. And my husband and I were teaching at the same school at the, at the time in Iowa. And in the summer of 2015 we were told the campus was closing, so we were both losing our jobs. Wow.

We're working together at the same university.

Same university. So we had this one year where we knew we were losing our jobs and we had to find new places and the whole country was open and so we were applying for jobs wherever and there was a school in the Midwest that kind of approached us. They were a faith based school and they started talking to us and that was the first time I ever really thought about a Christian university. So I went online to the CCC website looking for more information about the school and I stumbled on Multnomah's AT&Applied and now I am here. So it really is. Yeah, it was providential. I never thought we were going to come to Oregon. We were looking to move further east towards family in Tennessee and Pennsylvania. And we're in Portland. Wow.

So, wow, that's. That's quite a story.

How many years in Multnomah?

Just finished my sixth.

Sixth. Wow. Six years.

Yeah.

All right, so now at Multnomah you teach biology, you teach multiple science classes, not just biology, is that right?

Well, they're all in the biology realm, but I teach General Biology 1 and 2 to our first year students. I teach cell biology, microbiology, I've taught genetics, I've Taught anatomy and physiology. I taught the first version of our science and faith integration class. So. Okay, a little bit of everything.

Yeah. And since you've been here, I suppose you've been working at developing this ability to. To integrate the two, right? Yeah. And that's what I'm hoping that you'll want to talk a bit about today. Yeah. All right. Well, where would you like to start? How did that start for you?

You know, a couple years ago, I think about three years ago, we got sort of a directive from the board saying we needed to really beef up our integration of faith in our disciplines. And so it was supposed to be a two year project, which I don't think has ever quite come back around, but I did a lot of reading that summ. I was reading a person named Nicholas Woltersdorf, who's a philosopher. He's been at Yale primarily, I think also Calvin University. And he wrote, he had a collection of essays called Educating for Shalom. And so he's talking about the purpose of higher education, Christian higher education in particular, in that we are to bring about. Prepare students to bring about shalom in the world, to look at human flourishing and how our disciplines can do that. And it was. I really got into those essays and they were wonderful. So I started thinking about how can we do this? And so I sort of wrote this like brain dump of an outline which three people have seen because I'm kind of embarrassed. But it was a whole bunch of ideas. They just got down on paper and then Covid hit and it just slid off the back burner. And so there really wasn't time to get back into it. And it's one of those things that kind of has to marinate for a while in order to get something constructive. And so anyway, it went off the back burner. And finally this summer, after going to the CCCU's new Faculty Institute two years ago, also before COVID the facilitator there was Dr. David Smith, who's an education instructor, German instructor at Calvin. And he talked about an educational reformer named Kamanius who was from the 1500s. He's a Moravian. And Commandus's idea is that education should make us better people. And so this summer I was reading Camenius's work and thinking back to the work from Wolterstorff. I was reading that education should make it a better world and sort of started putting those together. So it's been a long process of lots of reading and lots of, lots of ideas swirling around.

Yeah, lots of deep thinking about the Theory of it. So has there been. Have you had a chance to. To put some of this stuff into practice yet? What is that looking like?

I haven't had a lot of chance to put it into practice overtly, but that has been something I have been thinking about like how do teaching some of these things. So Commandius's idea is that we teach virtue. We teach knowledge first of all, because that's what we teach. We teach stuff and then. But we also need to teach virtue so how we should behave. And then we also need to teach piety so worship and kind of where all of the knowledge fits in the grand scheme of things. And so haven't gotten really into actually incorporating those because this is kind of brand new thoughts. But I've started thinking a little bit about how do. How would we teach virtue in the sciences? How would we teach worship or piety? And then how do we broaden students perspectives to think globally? So as far as kind of the global perspective, I had a textbook that I've used past couple years that uses case studies and th. They place those case studies all over the world and so I try to highlight some of those things for my students. So we had a case study of research done in Papua New Guinea. We had some that were done in Tanzania, some that were done in Oregon, some that were in Brazil. So trying to get them to see hey, we do science all over the world.

Yeah.

So that's one way I've tried to kind of bring in that global perspective. I think my task for this coming year is how do we bring in virtue and, and worship into classes? Because you don't see that. And I've never really watched that being modeled in a science classroom.

Yeah. As a scientist though yourself, how, how do you see virtue and piety kind of coming together for you and your. Your discipline of doing science for virtue?

It's kind of interesting. The scientific community has a really, really strong ethical code. And so it is. You must be honest in your research. You must be a good steward of the money you're given to do the research. You can't be fraudulent, you can't. There's actually even codes that say if, if you receive government money to do your research, which most university labs in the country do, and somebody asks you for one of your reagents, you have to share it for free. So there's a lot, there's rules on how you work with human subjects, how you work with animals, all sorts of stuff. So there's already a really strong code there and all of that stuff is compatible with Christianity, but it only talks about what you do with your research. It doesn't talk about how you are as a person in the lab. How are you working with your colleagues. It doesn't talk about how you're working with your competitors, and it doesn't talk about how you work in your personal life, outside. And so one of the things I'm kind of interested in doing is to bring in some of those things. So how do we think about being compassionate people in a lab with our colleagues? How do we think about being generous and empathetic and so forth, but then also, how do we take our scientific virtues out into the world as well?

Yeah, well. Well, we've worked together for quite a few years now, and I don't think you have maybe had a chance to ever find out, if it wasn't for this podcast episode, that one of my favorite subjects in school was biology, actually, in genetics. I. I was really, really passionate about it. It's something just connected with me on that, and that's why I went into computer science. Makes sense. You from English.

I love literature.

That's why I was like, y. Natural transition from one of my favorite subjects into all this. I am, I'm very thankful for. For the work that you do. I love that we keep adding letters to the stem. Steam stream is just going on, and I just love that it's. It's getting bigger. Maybe we need to add the F from the F8 component in there soon. But I've seen. I've seen the church, if you. The concept of university coming out of church. 1400s, 1200s, 1400s, and being kind of the pioneers in many fields. And then we get to a point where you have the separation, strong separation of industry and faith and religion, and then faith and science, and now with a major effort to bring it back. So I'm just curious, personally, from what you've seen, do you see great efforts in this. Have you seen progress in this regard just in your field? And what are some of the wins that you've seen? I know that you've went and you've been invited to talk at high schools and just. And Christian high schools. And I was really excited about that. But how have you seen this progression that. I feel there's great momentum for it now.

Yeah, there's actually a good number of organizations that are looking at how to integrate science and faith. I think one of our biggest champions has been Francis Collins and his BioLogos organization. Francis Collins is the current. Well, actually, he just retired Head of the National Institutes of Health, probably one of our best geneticists in the country. But he started a group called biologos, which looks at the intersection of science and faith. He had to step back from that, but they've done a lot of good work on that. The American Scientific Affiliation also is a science and faith organization. I'm going to their conference in San Diego at the end of July. And so they. The talks there range on anything from math and artificial intelligence to evolution and biology and education and so forth. So I think there's a lot of things coming out. Even last week on campus, we had. His name's gonna escape me. David Wilkinson.

Yes.

From the University of Durham, talking about faith and science and how pastors can use that in the church. So there are a lot of resources out there, but it also sort of depends on what perspective you take on how you read scripture and how it intersects with science. And that's. There's not one way to do that.

I have one. One more follow up. Just a few seconds of reflection. Covid, now we are one of the blessed ones that on campus we have a biologist, a cell biologist, that your input and insight was just invaluable here at Multnomah. Whenever you presented on your. Your views on how we actually need to protect and all this, it was. It was such a blessing. I feel like Covid, was this great clash of faith and science where. Where people used science and I've seen hats with it's science, but that had a lot of things in it. And in many cases it was political science, but, you know, that's besides the point. And then used faith to defend why they have a position or another. And our very own professor Kristin Kidney, I loved her response to this because I thought it was very insightful. The fact that we need both eyes to have depth. And sometimes when you close one, you lose a lot of the depth. You just don't lose half of the sight. You lose the depth in something. So I've always appreciated the perspective of faith and science. Are both eyes to see the depth of the world that God created. That's our view here. Lessons learned from how science provided a lot of good information and how faith should have really kept people going and all this. But they clashed a little bit. Just you as a biologist, you've watched this. You've seen two years of the clash of the titans in the last two years. Any lessons learned?

One is that I think we need a better view of how science actually works because science is always tentative or faith we need better understanding of faith too. But science is always tentative. And I know, I've had faculty here tell me, oh, it must be great to be a scientist. Science is always right. No, it's not. 50% of it's wrong. We just don't know which 50%. And science is a self correcting part process. And so I think we need to understand that scientific information comes out slowly and we had a new virus and we didn't know a lot of it. So we're learning on the fly. From the science side, though, science communicators need to understand that we're in a new realm where instant updates are expected. And so scientists would communicate, here's what we know today, but it might change tomorrow, it might change in a half an hour. We don't know. And so trying to kind of balance that, that the knowledge we have is tentative, the best we know now with a public that's craving information and craving certainty. And those two don't work well in real time. So I think that's been a big thing. And I was at the Biologus conference earlier this spring and Francis Collins spoke and that was one of the things he talked about was how the backlash just flabbergasted him. It just threw him for a loop. He wasn't expecting it. And so I think that's. As scientists, we have to do a better job of communicating what we're actually doing and that things are tentative at the same time. Yes. Yeah.

I, one of the things that I really appreciated, I think really showed the dependency or interdependency of both. And I love that we get to take that back into the classroom to say, look, you cannot separate the virtue, you cannot separate another thing that I. These are hard, hard questions. I'm very thankful for your, your input with this is there's a certain country in Europe which will remain, you know, unnamed and, but they do have a queen and they do a lot of research in, you know, the biochemistry and all that stuff. And one of the newspapers said something that was very interesting to me and said they actually moved a lot of that research to America because we're looser in virtues and looser in the integrity that needs. So we can push the agenda on research way more than they are allowed to do it there. And so that caught me off guard because, you know, I love this country with all my heart, but I really appreciate the perspective on ethics, on virtue and all this and on formation of the students to really understand the results of what they're doing. And how the impact comes from just this is a large question, and I have any room to go anywhere with it. But you've now taught one or two or three generations of students coming through your classrooms. How have you seen the evolution of students in the way they approach science? Is it. And I love the fact that we see more gender, different diversity of gender, and all this in the classroom in STEM and steam. But as you're seeing new generations come, what are some observations that you're having from how they approach science or how. How the conversations go into, especially in terms of virtues and ethics and piety and. And the things that you've mentioned?

I think one thing I've seen with students, and I just finished my 18th year of teaching, so that's been a long, long journey I've seen. It seems like students come in with less of a focus on learning for its own sake and more of learning as a prerequisite for a career. And so it seems like one of the things I've seen has just been much more. Less curiosity, I guess I would say less curiosity and more. Just tell me what I need to.

Know so I can go through this. I can go through the motions.

Right? And I actually brought this up in a class one time a few years ago, and I said, here's the impression I get sometimes that, you know, you really want to be a physical therapist, let's say, but to do that, you have to go to a physical therapy program, and that's just kind of a hoop you have to jump through. But to get to physical therapy school, you have to have a bachelor's degree, and that's just sort of a hoop you have to jump through to get to that point. And to get your bachelor's degree, you have your science classes, and that's just sort of a hoop you have to jump through. And there were far too many heads nodding in agreement at that point. I think I got something there, but it just. It feels different than when I was in college. And it seems like it has become much more of a utilitarian approach to education. Tell me what I need, and if I don't see a direct need for it, don't give it to me.

There's pushback.

People don't want to probably like that with our general education classes, you know, like, why did I have to take Poli Sci? I don't know, but it seems like it's a little more of that.

Yeah, I think there's a. There's a positive and negative to that because they're pushing and making us better. Making sure that, you know, our curriculum is tight and they go through. But. But there is the interesting observation of curiosity and. And I think that even puts more pressure on forming them in their character and integrity and all that. So excited about that. Any. Any other questions before we actually head into a rapid fire? Sarah, I cannot thank you enough for actually stopping by mutalks and sharing these great insights with us. We have the pleasure at On MU talks to also get to know who Sarah is. Not the professor or the scientist, but Ra. Sarah, the person is. And we do that with very quirky questions and random shuffled questions. So, Renee, you want to go for it?

Yes, I think this one is appropriate. If you could. Would you go to outer space?

Probably not.

I'm not that adventurous.

I like my microscopes.

Oh, you see, that's a universe right there.

That is a universe.

Like, I don't have to travel so far to get into. Okay. If you could have a superpower, what would it be? And I know you have many, actually. Just.

Just for the record, I've been asked this before. I think being invisible.

Being invisible.

Wow.

Is this the first on Amy Talk? I think it's the first on being.

In the spotlight, actually.

Well, that superpower would definitely help.

What was your very first.

Campus safety at Rhodes College.

Campus Safety.

I was the person who got to get all the parking tickets and identify who they belong.

You were the most loved?

Oh, yeah.

I got to identify who they belonged to so that the billing office could bill them for them.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

This still remains to the day. My favorite prank, when I got a ticket from campus safety and I scanned it and made my own, and then I gave all my colleagues, like, fake tickets. That remains my favorite. If you had a pet parrot, what would you teach it to you? Walk in the house. Here's your pet parrot.

Actually, I just saw this on Facebook. Something my uncle posted about a parrot. Oh, my gosh. I'm a parrot. Help, please. Actually, I think it was supposed to be, Sorry, don't think very quickly on my feet. I think it was supposed to be, help, someone turn me into a parrot.

Turn me into a parrot. That's really funny.

What is one movie or TV show that you would like to live in?

You're asking a person who doesn't have a tv.

Okay, a book, then.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

A story that you would like to live in.

Pride and Prejudice.

Wow.

Okay, okay.

No comments. No comments. Do you have a secret talent?

I don't know. That's a secret. But I like to bake.

Bake.

Yeah.

Well, it was a secret for me. I didn't know. We didn't take. I didn't. I was not in any recipient of that. That secret talent.

That's because Debbie Chen moved out of this office when we used to do the Christmas goodies.

Oh, here we go.

Yes.

We need to bring back good traditions at Manoma. Here we go.

What is the best ice cream flavor?

I just made almond fudge. That was pretty good. Almond ice cream fudge swirl.

I want the listeners to really hear that. Well, I just made. I just made. Yeah, I've heard some really interesting stories of what can be made in those labs. That was a home, but I just heard some really good stories, even from you. What can be actually really made in those labs, which is really interesting. If you could have. This is my last question before we go into the questions that we have. If you could have a lifetime supply of anything, what would it be?

Cheese. It's quick.

That was not even. Like. I didn't even finish the question. Okay, now we know the way to Sarah's heart.

That's right. Good cheese.

Good cheese.

Good cheese.

Oh, cheese.

All right.

I wish another episode when we have Sarah. We need to remember to. To really define and ask what is good cheese?

I can talk about that. I teach microbiology.

Microbiology. And we talk.

Why didn't we start with that topic today with cheese?

That would have been a way to.

Talk about STEM and steam. Okay, well, Sarah, everyone who comes into this studio with us has something in common, and that is that we all highly value higher education. That's why we're all here and serving the students at Multnomah. And so we want to wrap up our episode by just talking a little bit about education and your thoughts about education. And to start with, could you tell us a story or a memory from your own educational journey from childhood through adulthood?

This one's not really a formal educational experience, but my dad's father, my grandfather, loved puzzles, puns, things like that. And I think he saw that I enjoyed those, and he really fostered that. So he would send me word puzzles and things like that in the mail. And I think he. He really just encouraged that. And to this day, I love seeing patterns and puzzles and things like that.

Yeah, wonderful.

If you could change one thing about education, what would it be?

The pace, I think, for students. We have so many students who are. Who think that in order to make it through college, they have to do athletics, they have to work 30 hours a week, and school gets kind of pushed out. And I wish they had time to just be students and to develop that curiosity and learning. And for my fellow faculty colleagues, I wish we had the time to sit and just discuss a little more and let you know our own curiosities bubble up. Yeah.

And what is something that you have learned recently or that you're currently learning?

Well, we started talking about it at the beginning, but this whole idea of how to integrate virtue and piety and shalom into science education, that's really bubbled up this summer. And in fact, on our faculty retreat a couple weeks ago, one of the questions was, what's giving you life? And it was this, because it's something I've been thinking about for a while, but it felt like it was finally coalescing. And so that's been a lot of what I've been learning about.

That's so exciting. And I'm so happy for the students here at Multnomah that are going to get to go on that journey with you. This is going to be a journey of learning and practicing together and discussing and, yeah, I wish you all the best in that.

Thank you.

Sarah, thank you so much for being with us today and for everybody listening to us. You can actually learn more about our STEM programs and our science programs by going to multoma. Edu. Dr. Sarah Gall, thank you for being with us. Not only that, Dr. Sarah Gaul is a biology professor, but she's also a program chair here, and you would actually have the great honor to study under her leadership. So come to us. Us, go to Manoma. Edu. We'd love to have you here. As always, the views and opinions expressed on MU talks belong to the people that are so graciously coming to MU talks and talking to us about life and stuff.

Sa.