My apologies if my teacher internship is dominating this blog lately. It’s been quiet on the business end of Florida Citizens for Science, so there isn’t much to write about there. But there is plenty going on in my classroom: pig dissections!
Unfortunately, the biology curriculum does not allow for much in the way of dissections nowadays. I can remember way back to my high school biology days when we dissected a whole list of critters. However, the curriculum has shifted focus away from dissections, and small budgets also play a role. Teachers can actually go all the way through biology without a single dissection! My host teacher believes students should have some dissection experience and so fits pigs into the curriculum section on human body systems, using the pigs for comparative anatomy.
The dissections started Wednesday and quickly became the talk of the whole school. There are typically several absences in each of the three biology periods, but there were barely any that day! The students were excited, and plenty were initially squeamish, of course. With aprons, gloves and goggles on, they did a quick exterior examination and then got busy cutting into the abdomen. There was plenty to see inside; these pigs were huge! They were generally about 35 cm from snout to tail base. Today, the kids picked up where they left off from yesterday. They found the parts of the digestive, urinary and reproductive systems. Tomorrow, they wrap up with the respiratory and circulatory systems.
I was impressed by how engaged the kids were. Even the most squeamish among them eventually couldn’t resist getting a good look at what was going on. There were a couple of students who chose to do the computer virtual dissections, but not many. Overall, this was a great experience for both me and all of the students. The kids are at their best when they are actively doing something versus just sitting, reading and listening.
Dave said to tell you it’s just like doing an autopsy! 😉
I’m not too sure about that. I’ve handled human bodies before (not autopsies, but removing dead bodies from disaster scenes), and I imagine it would be so much … bigger. Ya know?
I think it’s great that you’re concerned about hands-on learning, but don’t forget that can include non-animal teaching tools! In fact, a few recent studies have found that students who learned human anatomy by building clay sculptures of each human body system were significantly better at identifying the constituent parts of human anatomy than their classmates who performed cat dissections.
Software and models actually help better prepare students for future medical careers, as well. Today, nearly 95% of U.S. medical schools do not use any animals to train medical students, and undergraduate students applying to medical school are neither expected nor required to have experience with animal experimentation or dissection. The American Medical Student Association (AMSA) also states, in a 2007 resolution, that it “strongly encourages the replacement of animal laboratories with non-animal alternatives in undergraduate medical education.â€
Anyone interested in more information on virtual dissection—such as peer-reviewed educational research, physician-narrated video demonstrations of two leading virtual dissection software programs, discount codes for educational software products, comprehensive resource lists, and more—should visit PETA.org/dissection.