Hey science twitter, now that we’ve got a highly visible science lover with a creationist bent engaging with us, please take a pause to listen and learn from the professional science communicators on here before wading in.

Why does this matter? Because if people feel that you don’t respect them, they quite reasonably won’t engage with what you have to say. If you can’t find it in yourself to actually respect people who have ID/creationist beliefs, just step aside for scientists who are more kind.

If you are dragging creationists, you’re not helping people understand and accept the facts of evolution. It just pushes people away and makes scientists look like assholes.

Insulting creationists sends others the message that you care more about being right than about learning.

(To be clear, I’m not saying I’m one of the pros. I’m not publicly engaging on this issue, other than telling fellow scientists to be kind, to listen, and to accept realities about science education relating to emotions, identity, and mutual respect.)

I have plenty of experience teaching evolution in a classroom, including students who regard evolution as contradictory with their beliefs.

I’ve changed some minds, over time. In every case, I can tell you that this process began with genuine mutual respect.

By the way, my new book about College Science Teaching is built on The Respect Principle.

A lot of us teach as if students are adversaries, instead of fellow explorers. We should be learning coaches, not bosses or judges.

If you’d like a lot of practical tips about building a respectful science course focused on learning and student success (including online courses!), my book ships at the end of the month, and it’s just 18 bucks. https://amzn.to/2yoaP9Y 

I’ll ship free copies to two randomly selected people who ‘like’ this tweet. I’m not going to make you RT it :) I’ll give this tweet 24 hours to collect the likes, then I’ll DM the winners.

(By random, I mean random! I’ll generate a list, use a random number generator for each name, and pick the two highest numbers. Okay, it might be pseudorandom, though functionally not indistinguishable from random, if that’s how excel’s random number generator rolls.)

A highly effective practice in teaching is “backwards design.” Think of the learning destination you have in mind, and then trace back the learning path that leads to this place.

In the case of teaching evolution to creationists, let’s go backwards following the route of people who were raised in environments where evolution was not accepted. Here, we need to listen, maybe starting with the replies and quote tweets of this thread from former creationists.