A TRANSDISCIPLINARY TEAM-TAUGHT COURSE IN PALEONTOLOGY (AND PSYCHOLOGY!) WITH EXTENSIVE LEARNING EXPERIENCES OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM

“Behavior of Animals: Dead and Alive,” a transdisciplinary undergraduate course at University of North Carolina Wilmington, represented an unusual teaching collaboration between a paleontologist (Kelley) and a psychologist (Bruce). The course was nontraditional in terms of an innovative combination of disciplines and in offering many learning experiences outside the classroom. As an Honors seminar designed to promote experiential learning, the class participated in UNCW’s “Lyceum” fall-break trip to Washington, D.C.

Our class focused on methods psychologists use to quantify or describe animal behavior and how paleontologists infer such behavior in dead animals (i.e., fossils). In class, students discussed outside readings, practiced recording animal behaviors from videos, and examined fossils (including trace fossils) in the lab to learn how to recognize behavior of fossil organisms. During the Lyceum trip we visited the National Zoo, where teams of students observed, described, inventoried, and tested a hypothesis about an animal’s behavior. We experienced a “behind-the-scenes” tour of the paleontology collections at the National Museum of Natural History, and students explored the exhibits and deduced behaviors of fossil dinosaurs, mammals, humans, and invertebrates using paleontological methods of inference.

Teams of students conducted and presented a “live animal” research project, observing animal behaviors in the campus environment, and a “dead animal behavior” project, testing hypotheses based on fossils they collected at a local quarry. End-semester reflection papers addressed what they had learned, how they had learned it, and how the two approaches complemented each other. Students expressed appreciation for being exposed to two different perspectives and found innovative ways the two fields complemented each other, despite differences in the approaches to understanding animal behavior. They also affirmed the value of the hands-on learning experiences, particularly the Lyceum activities and the research conducted outside the classroom. Although transdisciplinary team teaching can be challenging in terms of pedagogy and logistics, exploration of a topic from different perspectives can be very rewarding, especially when enriched by activities outside the classroom.