I think that Friday's tech class was quite interesting, it was not only helpful, but also engaging. It is so refreshing to have courses that are interactive, it's a nice change from the 300 person lecture halls of my undergrad!
Anyway, that was my random sidetrack moment. So I think that the most interesting part of Friday's class was listening to all of the interdisciplinary aspects of the activity. It wasn't until around my junior year of college that I really started to appreciate the true relatedness between different science courses, and science and other academic disciplines. I mean, everyone knows that the body is made up of living cells, but I wonder- does everyone know that cells are really just a bunch of chemical elements and molecules that are interacting together through chemical reactions? To the science people, this is obvious, but it's also so important and rarely mentioned. One of my favorite scholarly books "Armies of Pestilence" is a look at how diseases have shaped the world's stage- everything from the fall of ancient Rome to the current economic states of many third world countries is shaped by microorganisms. These relations fascinate me, and so it was great to see that the class could take one real world problem and apply it to every teaching major. I can't wait to see how I can make biology an interdisciplinary subject, and I'm excited to learn more about it through our research and activities.
Here's the video Dana showed our group in class on friday, it's hilarious, so if you didn't watch it, you totally should!
Katie, this is the best news for us. We were hoping that circulating the room so that you could each hear the connections made by people in other subject disciplines would be more than just, well, a time filler. We felt that this activity *might* give us an authentic context in which to support inter-disciplinary thinking (among other things) and I'm glad that this was a positive for you.
ReplyDeleteNow I am very interested in reading that book! I too found it very interesting to hear how the other subject matter areas approached the same topic and made me wish I had some more inventive teachers in high school that used real life scenarios for subject matter.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it was very interesting to see how people from different disciplines take different approaches to address the same situation. Also i was really glad to get a chance to apply content knowledge to an activity instead of having to apply metacognitive knowledge.
ReplyDeleteMultidisciplinary teaching, if it is ever an option for you, can be immensely rewarding for you and for the students, because they get to see the interconnectivity of what they are learning, for the reasons you articulate so well above. Some middle schools revolve around teams so that this can be facilitated, and some high schools have joint history/English humanities blocks.
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