In the fall of 2014, my colleague Claudia Aburto Guzmán suggested that we should teach a course together. Claudia is a member of the Bates College Department of Hispanic Studies and specializes in Latin American literature. She teaches language, literature, and translation courses. She is a published poet and her scholarship includes discourses and actions in and around the U.S.-Mexico border. It was not immediately obvious to me how a laboratory biochemist would teach a course with a scholar of Latin American literature, but Claudia had already been thinking about intersections between the humanities and natural sciences; her suggestion set off almost two years of conversations and planning. These discussions convinced me of the importance of bringing the issue of human interests vs. human welfare into the education of natural scientists, and Claudia's vision of a bridge between the natural sciences and the humanities offered a means by which this could happen. A priority for us was to develop a teaching model that truly integrated the natural sciences and humanities, so that the artificial boundaries contrived to separate them disappeared. This is in contrast to previous attempts to design interdisciplinary courses, described in the pedagogy literature, that simply involved two instructors from different fields meeting separately with a class and presenting topics piecemeal, pursuing what we termed the "jigsaw puzzle model", and never integrating the ideas coming from their respective disciplines. I was afforded by our work with the opportunity to learn about how humanists view and analyze situations and events that take place in world and how they develop new knowledge through pulling together numerous lines of reasoning from multiple places and directions. This contrasts with the more linear approach that is typically characteristic of scholarship in the natural sciences, but it is at least as challenging to carry out successfully and requires, I think, greater creativity.
As a topic around which we could build a framework for students to explore the intersections between human interests and human welfare and between the natural sciences and humanities, we chose healthcare and public health. This allowed us to bring together natural science scholarship, its applications, its interdependence with cultural development, and its entanglement with human rights, but we also realized that we needed to teach the course within a particular geographical and social context, i.e. a place, to prevent the ideas we wanted to teach from becoming diffused. Several published studies have highlighted the importance of place in teaching about cultures. We selected Chile to provide this context, because it is a middle income country with an effective public health system, a well-developed scientific research enterprise, and a history punctuated with stark conflicts between human interest and the welfare of varied population sectors. Chile also provided us with the ability to make use of Claudia's familiarity with the its history and culture.
Our first experiment in which we put into motion our ideas was a five-week course during the Bates short term of 2016, Biomedicine and Human Rights: The Case of the Chilean Mining Experience. The focus on mining and miners provided a rich topic because Chilean miners have played a major role in the development of democracy in their country, through their fights for human and healthcare access rights. This course began with two-weeks of on-campus classroom and laboratory meetings, followed by two weeks in Chile. On campus, Claudia and I shared classroom instruction. The lectures and discussions, along with live action role-playing and laboratory exercises, provide insights into the nature of science and the scientific method of inquiry, a background of the history of medical science in Latin America, as well as its interrelation with dominant Western thought vis a vis traditional notions of integrated medicine, and introduced students to the history of mining, and its impact on human welfare into the 19th and 20th centuries in Latin America and Chile, specifically. Our shared presence in the classroom allowed both of us to contribute to the discussions and simultaneously bring our respective disciplines into the landscape. By the end of the two weeks, the students were spontaneously applying both natural science and humanities analysis and problem-solving methods in their explorations of the questions we presented to them. In Chile, the students visited the Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Chile in Santiago, where they engaged with faculty working in basic sciences and public health to learn about biomedine and healthcare delivery. They visited a historic copper mining site and museums to learn about the history of Chile and the mining industry and the art and culture of the country. They also visited important human rights museums and sites. We conducted frequent meetings with the students to discuss their experiences and how these related to the objectives of the course. Upon return to campus, the students prepared final projects, each selecting a topic that required an integration of the natural sciences and humanities to explicate. These projects were presented in a public forum.
We decided to expand our teaching model and apply it in a fall semester abroad (FSA) program, Culture and Public Health in Chile, which we conducted in 2018. We retained public health as the analysis topic, but we broadened our focus to encompass a larger portion of Chilean society beyond mining. In keeping with the general structure of Bates FSA programs, we designed the program around four courses. One of these provided Spanish language education and was taught by local instructors. We recruited Dr. Óscar Arteaga Herrera of the Escuela de Salud Pública de la Universidad de Chile to participate with us. Óscar taught an introductory public health course. Claudia designed and taught Rogue Cultural Representations of Science: Viruses, Difference, and the Question of Security and Order, and I taught Genetically Modified Organisms: Science and Latin American Perceptions. Between the three non-language courses, we covered multiple aspects of the science of health and disease, how societies address public health, and how natural science interacts with culture, cultural expression, governments, and economies. We met with the students almost weekly to engage them in discussions and exercises that brought together ideas presented in the three courses and highlighted the intersections between human interests and human welfare. Our program included several day-long and three multi-day excursions outside of Santiago, to explore public health and healthcare access in the more sparsely populated regions that are characterized by wildly varied geographies and climates, as well has to provide opportunities to experience wider swaths of culture, art, and history. The students prepared final projects, both research papers and presentations, that were in part based upon interviews they conducted with professional healthcare providers and healthcare recipients.
The details of our FSA program and its outcomes and products can be explored in greater detail here:
Advice for natural scientists who accept the challenge of learning to co-teach outside of their discipline:
Be prepared to spend a lot of time in the design and preparation of the course. If done properly, the development of an integrated interdisciplinary course or program will require more time and effort than any natural science course you may have taught.
Drop any preconceived notion that the natural sciences are inherently superior to or more useful than other disciplines. They are not, and if you hold onto that concept, you will not succeed in developing an integrated interdisciplinary course. Plus, any colleague outside the natural sciences with whom you attempt to work will justifiably find you obnoxious and arrogant.
It is critical that the collaborators maintain an open communication line, freely share ideas, and are comfortable accepting critiques from each other. Each collaborator must contribute equally to the effort.
Be flexible about classroom activities. The traditional lecture approach that still dominates most natural science courses is not an appropriate or effective teaching method in a collaborative setting. A truly integrated interdisciplinary course requires that the contributing disciplines not be segregated by the teaching approach used. The collaborators must learn from each other and combine their teaching methods. The natural scientist may have to give up some content, but the re-conceptualization of the science through a fresh lens is worth it.
Teach together. Be in the classroom with your collaborator and share insights and perspectives in front of and with the students. This is important to avoid the "jigsaw puzzle model" of teaching, which inhibits integration.
Be flexible about assessment tools. Assignments and exams must reflect the analysis and problem-solving approaches of both disciplines. Traditional science exams will not be appropriate.
Be prepared that some of your natural science colleagues may not take your participation in an integrated interdisciplinary pedagogy project seriously. It takes time from your laboratory or field scholarship and from teaching in the mainstream natural science curriculum, although you will develop a broader perspective of science as a result. This also means that it will be more difficult for pre-tenured faculty to engage in this kind of teaching.