Promoting Interdisciplinary Learning: A Cross-Course Assignment for Undergraduate Students in Advanced Biology and Drawing Courses

Abstract

Exposing students to interdisciplinary learning experiences has many benefits including a richer understanding of complex problems, promoting metacognition, and recognizing how to effectively use their skills. For biology students, immersion in creativity and design-thinking inherent to the arts can aid in their ability to imagine, innovate and communicate science. For art students who have been trained to develop unique visual vocabularies, an important learning experience would be to communicate didactic knowledge of an unfamiliar domain in a way that is visually compelling, imaginatively open-ended and informative. For both cohorts of students, academic training at the undergraduate level has remained somewhat sequestered in disciplinary silos. If we are to truly prepare students for careers in which they innovate, work collaboratively, solve problems and continue to learn, then we must provide authentic inquiry-based assignments that allow them to see the value of such proficiencies. This was the rationale behind designing this interdisciplinary assignment for biology and art students at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Here, we report on the design, implementation and insights from the pilot offering of this assignment. We hope that this provides a useful teaching tool for instructors interested in promoting interdisciplinary teaching and learning at the undergraduate level.