AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO TEACHING IN A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY CONTEXT

The Catalyst Scholarship Program at Hunter College recruits and supports talented students majoring in fields within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and mentors them through degree completion. It is an interdisciplinary Program shared among Geoscience, Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics. The Scholarship requires that scholars enroll over three successive semesters in a one-credit seminar course, the Catalyst Seminar (CS), designed to expose scholars to the diversity STEM disciplines and to highlight research options and careers in these disciplines. The Seminar provides a venue for scholars to meet regularly and to engage in research on various aspects of participating disciplines, with the goal of preparing scholars for future multi and interdisciplinary careers in the sciences. The first two-year period of the Program and the first sequence of semesters of the CS have now been completed.

The first semester of the CS was devoted to Exposure and Connections, accomplished through lectures by invited speakers on topics involving the disciplines participating in the Program. Scholars were required to read journal articles related to the lectures and to write a final short paper reflecting on the experience, all activities that are known to students at this level. Overall, this was a somewhat passive learning approach to research in classrooms. In the following two semesters we actively prepared scholars to work on research, particularly as young scientists in groups. In both semesters, we used a more active learning approach in which the students took ownership of their learning process through disciplinary and interdisciplinary engagement in a project. We used one semester to go through this process in a guided manner in which I was in charge of selecting and leading the ‘research project’ which although challenging to scholars, was ‘safe’ enough that answers were readily available. The third and final semester the approach was student-centered, with a coordinator that merely facilitated the formation of interdisciplinary research teams that took complete charge of the entire research enterprise. I will discuss our observations and assessment of the outcomes of this approach to teaching geosciences and will reflect on the first experience with the Catalyst Seminar.