BERG > Project NEXUS UMCP > Papers and Presentations
Plenary talk
Adding value through interdisciplinary conversation
Edward F. Redish
Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
While our majors are important, the primary teaching in most STEM departments are for students in other STEM disciplines. Chemistry teaches classes for biologists, mathematicians teach everyone, and physicists teach physics for pre-meds and biologists, chemists, and engineers. Traditionally, we each deliver these service courses firmly footed in our own disciplines, and each course reflects what we see as what’s important to learn, rather than what our clients might find valuable. Conversations with faculty in the departments we serve tend to be limited and often have little impact on our instruction. Recently, I have been interacting extensively with biologists, chemists, and mathematicians in HHMI’s Project NEXUS* to begin to create a new undergraduate science program for pre-meds and biologists that reflects development of appropriate content, skills, and competencies.** These interdisciplinary conversations have been eye-opening – and sometimes startling. Different STEM disciplines epistemologically frame introductory university science instruction differently. These diverse goals and approaches make it difficult for students taking courses in many STEM departments to make the connections between what they are learning in different classes. In this talk, I will discuss some of the things I have learned, some of our successes and failures, and what we have learned about our students’ responses to interdisciplinary STEM teaching and learning.
* Project NEXUS UMCP
** Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians (AAMC, 2009);
Poster presentation
Presenting Author: Benjamin Geller
Additional Authors: Benjamin W Dreyfus, Vashti Sawtelle, Chandra Turpen, Edward F Redish
We present qualitative data of undergraduates describing the relationship between scientific disciplines. Rather than viewing biology, chemistry, and physics as existing in disconnected silos, these students often describe the relationships in a hierarchical or horizontal fashion. The hierarchical arrangements order the disciplines by degree of system complexity, or by the scale used to examine a particular system. For example, a student might view the full description of folded proteins at the top (biology), chemical reactions involving proteins’ functions as chemistry, and motion of the protein's individual atoms as foundational (physics). Other students describe a horizontal view of disciplinary boundaries, without a foundational bottom but maintaining overlapping realms of interest. Others want physics embedded in a context that positions its relationship to biology via analogy. We examine evidence that students’ conceptions are unstable and context-dependent, and suspect that these conceptions are related to course messaging in a bidirectional manner.
Poster presentation
Presenting Author: Julia Svoboda
Additional Authors: Vashti Sawtelle, Chandra Turpen, Edward F. Redish
Recent national reports such as the AAMC/HHMI Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians and the AAAS Vision & Change Report reflect an emerging consensus among scientists and educators that undergraduate science education needs to better prepare students to reason and communicate across disciplines. Enacting this change requires creating courses for students that attempt to bridge disciplinary barriers rather than reinforce them. This aim raises challenges for curriculum designers centering on what it means for a task to be interdisciplinary. At the University of Maryland, we have piloted one year of a new physics course aimed at life science majors. The curriculum has been developed by an interdisciplinary team of physicists, biologists, biophysicists, and chemists, and involved departures from the traditional introductory physics curriculum in making decisions about what physics topics are most relevant for biology. In doing so, the course has explicitly taken up designing education contexts that support reasoning across disciplinary boundaries as a primary focus. Taking on this focus requires considering the many ways to create bridges between disciplines, and how the nature of these bridges is likely to influence how students engage with the learning task.
In this poster we present a framework for examining the ways in which disciplinary bridges are built between biology and physics and provide illustrative examples of the "interdisciplinary" tasks used in the physics for biologists course. Our aim in presenting this analysis is to bring awareness to variety of ways in which such tasks can be considered interdisciplinary (i.e. application tasks, or reconciliation tasks) and to examine the implications of this variation for student learning outcomes (i.e. conceptual understanding, or epistemological sophistication). Specifically, our framework (drawing on Paxson, 1996) examines (1) the degree of impact of one discipline on another and/or the level of connectedness between the disciplines in the task, (2) the ways in which the disciplines are individually represented in the task and the nature of the bridge between them. We then discuss the potential consequences of these differences for student learning outcomes. We argue that acknowledging these differences raises both practical considerations for curriculum designers as well as empirical questions for researchers investigating interdisciplinary learning.
Poster presentation
Presenting Author: Chandra Turpen
Additional Authors: Vashti Sawtelle, Julia Svoboda, and Edward F. Redish
Abstract: Our interdisciplinary team of scientists and educational researchers has begun the daunting task of thoughtfully redesigning and researching the transformation of an introductory physics course for biologists. We are constantly faced with making decisions about how the disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology are being portrayed in our tasks as well as in classroom discussions. As Strober (2011) says, “They [disciplines] provide not only ‘a conceptual structure,’ but also ‘an instructive community’ and ‘a communication network,’ as well as a ‘cultural system’ and a sense of personal identity.” This poster will discuss various lines of rhetorical argumentation for conceptualizing “disciplines” in the context of interdisciplinary learning articulating both literature bases one might draw from as well as analytical approaches one might take in current on-going research efforts. We present a framework which relies on two particular dimensions. First, “who is characterizing the discipline?” for example, social scientists, natural scientists, or students. Secondly, “what disciplinary activities are being examined?” such as a) the talk and practices of professionals or disciplinary experts, b) the preparation of newcomers into the discipline, or c) out-of-school, informal, or everyday contexts.
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