Increasing Student Engagement Through the Development of Interdisciplinary Courses

The changes in the defining ideas of the contemporary world, the exponential growth of knowledge, and the expansion of technological innovations have created a need for a critical examination of the convergences and connections between the Sciences, Engineering, and the Humanities. Today, there are areas of study so complex that they go beyond the confines of a single discipline. Examples of such areas include (1) the comparative study of concepts of mind, consciousness, and machines, (2) the critique of the technological culture through appropriate and alternative technology approaches, and (3) the questions surrounding cosmology, evolution, and beliefs. In response to this, we have developed interdisciplinary, team- taught, general education courses on artificial intelligence, appropriate technology, and the origins of the universe that respond to the above challenges, while fostering the ability of our students to use skill sets and concepts from different and divergent disciplines in order to examine such complex areas of study. The preliminary results indicate that, while there is a need for continuous retooling of the course model to better reflects the General Education goals and the university culture, this is a successful course model for our institution. The data also suggests that this type of interdisciplinary intervention in the beginning years of university study positively impacts the development of students' abilities in these areas. requirements examine the reciprocal relationships between science/technology and society/culture or the associated convergences. To remedy this situation, our educational project, "The Convergence of Science, Technology, and the Humanities", aims to examine the convergences in our culture through a set of interdisciplinary team-taught, theme-based GE courses that enable students to explore the links between the sciences and the humanities, with the goal of improving our students' engagement in their own learning. Given the complexity of the three above areas, an interdisciplinary approach is needed for the study of their diverse elements (2 - 7), with Klein and Newell (3) indicating that such a format provides a base and process for examining topics, questions, or problems that are too broad to be dealt with by a single discipline or profession (3).