Building an Interdisciplinary Course: Getting From Mine to Ours

Sandy Starts

I have had a long and complicated life with co-teaching, one that has enabled me to experience the different ways scholars in the same discipline, never mind in a different one, approach what and how they teach. Some lecture, others run discussions, workshops, laboratories, or a combination of these; some structure courses by chronology, others by theme. Regardless of approach, courses created together can still emphasize one teacher over another, depending on the day, a kind of your turn, my turn. Here, we discuss how we worked toward turning his—biology—and hers—English—into our integrative interdisciplinary course. As an English professor for over 45 years, I have learned most about pedagogy from those with whom I have taught, first with those in American Literature and Composition, then in theater, psychology, chemistry, and, lastly, biology. From teaching with colleagues in similar specializations, I have gained new insights into content, theory, and methodology. I have also learned to share, despite whatever anxiety and self-consciousness I may feel. Interacting productively in a class with colleagues in the same discipline, though, is less challenging, when it comes to considerations of course content. Words are what we work with in English—examining rhetorical figures, historical context, reception, usage, etc.—no matter our very different specializations. Even so, it is still easier to alternate: your turn, my turn. And my turn typically comes first when periodicity and chronology are privileged.

In a small rural college environment, disciplinary boundaries can be mutable and open to expansion when everyone knows everyone. Accidental conversations can result in discovering shared interests followed by discussing classes, pedagogies, and possibilities that might include recognition of compatible goals and how to fulfill them, requests for guest appearances in a course, and a realization of what could be accomplished by joining forces. That was the sequence of events that led to my co-teaching Performing Gender with a social psychologist in 1995, and, a year later, From Alchemy to Chemistry with an organic chemist. During that time, I began working on Lady Macbeth’s lines, “Screw your courage to the sticking place / and we’ll not fail.” Ironically, as it would happen, those might be lines best directed to myself rather than any willing or unwilling collaborator.

Being courageous so as not to fail when it comes to working across radically different disciplines, especially those that wear the crown in our age, is what we consider below. The imperative, “Screw your courage,” with its seemingly violent language and, in Shakespeare, intent, suggests what doing the unthinkable requires—defying fear, leaning into desire, overcoming obstacles and barriers—not to murder a king, even metaphorically, but to violate a different kind of hierarchy and inheritance.

Bryan, my present colleague in biology, uses familiar words to a different purpose. “Creation,” “origins,” “mutability,” “inheritance,” “hierarchy,” even “experiment” have different meanings now, in his field, than they did in the past, in the Middle Ages and early Modern period, my fields. When he uses these words, he does so with reference to evolution, genes and proteins, and recourse to advanced tools that can alter the very basic components of life itself. Those tools have already mastered alchemy: gold has been yielded from base materials and human life extended from those of its short-lived early practitioners. Still in vials, still metamorphosed colors, but without the dragons.

Language—the words we use that don’t mean the same thing from one discipline to another. Methodology—the way we do what we do. How to bring together such different assumptions about language and methods, make sense of both, make both matter in our classrooms and in our publications? How much different is it to teach in one’s field as the sole authority than it is to bring together two voices of authority in an interdisciplinary or interdomain course? What is the impact on one’s pedagogy, if any? What is the impact in the classroom and on the page? Telling stories is more typically a component of English classes and critical creative scholarship than what the conventions of scientific communication demand. A lab report is not personal narrative.

And yet, the standard of science classes—the laboratory—always seemed to me to reflect the height of experiential teaching and learning, of pedagogical experiment, though few of the scientists I have known would describe what they do in the undergraduate lab that way. Perhaps that’s because experimentation is taken for granted by them, or perhaps because “lectures” have been split off from laboratory work with instructors responsible for one or the other, not both, or perhaps because labs don’t seem like “real” science when the outcome has been pre-determined. Regardless, I loved labs—in the field and in the classroom—and wanted to figure out how to integrate them into literature and writing courses. So thirty years ago, when I first agreed to teach From Alchemy to Chemistry with a chemist, I insisted on incorporating weekly labs. I can’t say how much his teaching changed as a result of our joint effort, but I know the labs were of a different nature than what he was accustomed to. After all, I told him we would make gold and a love potion. In alchemy, failure is an accepted part of the process, of what was known as The Art.

Creating, or making, is what poets do, etymologically speaking; they are also illusionists. In Chaucer’s “Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” a character shows how process can be deceptive, how tools and ingredients—copper, mercury or quicksilver—through craft or art, can be used to gull the unwary. Nevertheless, following the character’s directions offers an active way to teach literature and science as well as the dangers, physical and spiritual, of the “crafty science” (1253), both known and imagined. “Science,” then meaning knowledge, was a short skip to the origin of sin. In the event, doing labs on both the routine and the impossible changed my understanding of how I read: how Milton uses the word sublime and sublimation in Paradise Lost; why Stoker deploys a chemical formula in Dracula. It not only changed the direction of my research, but also the assignments I required of students.

When I was in college, there were no guidelines for papers, except for the page length and a reminder to double-space: no suggested topics, no formatting requirements, no direction regarding library sources apart from edicts about plagiarism. That freedom, or lack of direction, is uncommon now: papers are scaffolded, works cited formats and styles enumerated—guidelines can be multiple pages, as I learned teaching with two younger colleagues in writing. My writing assignments have never attained that level of specificity, though they have changed, influenced both by writing specialists and by how I found myself reading after teaching with scientists: I began asking students to write journal entries, followed by papers, that in some way related to their major or major interest. Students did remarkable, sometimes ground breaking work. Though initially wary and anxious about how accounting or chemistry or cybersecurity could be relevant to Malory or Shakespeare, they invariably adapted, gaining new insights and learning that original research may require thinking about their discipline in ways they never considered and few demanded, namely, how it intersects other fields.

The challenge, however, reverted back to me: when students wrote about math (brilliant paper on a Gothic novelist) or chemistry (ingenious discussion of what Lewis Carroll’s Alice ingests), I was less competent in judging the science than the writing. Not unlike teaching with a chemist thirty years ago and now with a molecular biologist, I could not really counter assertions if they were made mathematically or in rows of formulas and theories I’d never studied. By contrast, I assumed that what I did was transparent: after all, students take English every year of their educational lives right through to the first and often second years of college. I was stunned, therefore, when my chemistry colleague didn’t “see” the alchemical metaphors, and he wasn’t alone: the science majors were no less befuddled while the humanities majors were wide-eyed or giggling. Penetrating substances, rubbing, generation. Really? There was a kind of equalizer in knowing something, anything, that the science teacher and his majors didn’t. Not exactly confidence, but a sense that maybe this English teacher could offer something every student and the teacher didn’t already know.

That balance would be shattered when, after moving to a much larger public college, I started working with a molecular biologist who minored in English. He worked with the unseen world I couldn’t even imagine. I didn’t know then, too, what I was soon to learn: he was the most popular biology teacher in the department, despite teaching an introductory course that did not result in all A’s. He would win the college teaching award.

Students understand the language he uses, the way he communicates a very different kind of story. Though he insists that the way he tells the story has changed, too. What follows is what followed at first, his turn.

Bryan Begins

I have a much shorter record with co-teaching than Sandy. In my own education, for instance, those experiences were limited to an undergraduate one-credit course in ballroom dancing, taught by a couple, and to four classes I took during my graduate studies in molecular biology. In three of these classes, the two instructors teaching the course divided the semester into halves, and each appeared exclusively responsible for one of them; the two halves were separate and distinct in content, pedagogy, assessment. Perhaps the instructors worked together to produce a bipartite final, perhaps there was a midterm and a final, equally weighted. Presumably, the teachers collaborated to assign the final grade, but interaction between them was largely hidden from the students. This arrangement seemed well-matched for the hyper-specialization of the discipline and of graduate school.

In the fourth class, instructors led groups of students in deep critical reading and analysis of primary scientific literature in cell biology, biochemistry, and molecular biology. I recall these discussions as sessions in which students and instructors (there was more than one instructor with each group) engaged with one another, and in which integrating, rather than simply collocating, the perspectives of multiple teachers enriched the conversation and fostered the spirit of inquiry. Nevertheless, this structure was the exception among models of co-teaching, as any kind of co-teaching was the exception among pedagogical models in my experience of science education.

It would be years later, after I had begun teaching for a small campus in a large research university, that I would again encounter the idea of co-teaching. Although I had, after a stint in pharmaceutical research, taken some time away from science, I now stood squarely in my discipline, having been hired to cover a general biology lecture course and a molecular cell biology lab and later developing a structural biology seminar and a molecular genetics laboratory course. Thus, when Sandy, an English professor and the coordinator of the college’s honors program, asked if I wanted to co-teach an integrative studies course for the university’s newly redesigned general education curriculum, I had little idea what I was getting myself into. I did, however, have a long-standing interest in subjects beyond not only molecular biology but beyond science. I asked what in the world the course would be about.

“Animals,” she said. “You’re a biologist, right?” She explained what should have been obvious to me, that it would be easiest for us to teach in our areas of specialization.

I told her my background was in genetic engineering. “Perfect,” she said. She told me she studied older literature. “Have you heard of medieval bestiaries?”

We titled the course From Beast Books to Resurrecting Dinosaurs.

I was excited, but my enthusiasm for this new academic adventure could fill neither the gaps in my teaching (and co-teaching) experience nor those in my knowledge of half of the proposed course material. The only bestiary I was familiar with was the Monster Manual by Gary Gygax for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game.

“We need primary sources,” my co-teacher said, putting a page in ancient Greek from the History of Animals beside its English translation. She showed me Ovid’s Metamorphoses (verse and prose translations), Pliny’s Natural History, the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, readings by and about Albertus Magnus. After Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls (middle English and modern translations)—that Chaucer had an interest in natural history was a revelation to me—there was Bacon’s New Organon and writings by Margaret Cavendish. Sandy included bestiaries, of course, illuminated and not, and a scholarly article arguing for the taxonomic intents (taxonomy in the Middle Ages?!) of the monks who produced them.

I certainly had heard of Aristotle, Sir Francis Bacon, and Linnaeus (although many of the other authors were new to me) and had a vague understanding of their contributions to science, but I had never read these texts, much less discussed them, much less taught them. And there was a broader challenge: I didn’t know how to read, discuss, or teach them, not as a scholar of history, literature, religious studies, etc. would. My undergraduate minor in English, itself almost ancient history, was a product largely of my interests in reading for pleasure and in creative writing. But my partner exuded competence and confidence, and so I responded with my own selections—primary sources, popular press accounts, and video and textbook-ish summaries—in evolutionary theory, classical and molecular genetics, and synthetic biology, including de-extinction biology, a field that was advancing rapidly due to the introduction of CRISPR technologies for engineering genomes. Although Sandy explained to me that the field of molecular biology was in its infancy during her schooling, she knew of these things—of so many things, really (which she attributes, modestly, to her tendency to read widely, deeply, compulsively)—and added delightfully apt poems about Darwin and the DNA double helix along with stories of futuristic science fiction worlds from Bacon and Cavendish. I took this as agreement with the curriculum I was laying out for “my half” of the course. (We would use that phrase often in the first several years of teaching together, always italicized or with scare quotes.) No doubt she had read the same in my expressed enthusiasm for “her” readings and ideas, when it in fact represented my wonder at the material’s scope, variety, and the content itself, along with my blind, albeit truly targeted, faith in her abilities and knowledge as a scholar and teacher.

For our first offering of Beasts, we organized the material chronologically, with my co-teacher (obviously) responsible for the first half of the course. She chose the readings, wrote the assignment prompts, designed the first midterm exam. Although she carefully considered whatever input I offered, I didn’t feel equipped to provide much more than superficial suggestions. She taught, I assumed, as she normally would on her own. I did the readings and homework and attended each class, and when I interjected sporadic questions and observations, it was for my own edification as much as for our students’. Occasionally, I was as perplexed as they were. And yet, over the course of those seven weeks, I gained an (admittedly shaky) understanding of the texts and the relationships among them and how the theories formed a foundation (or not) for the later science, the science I would teach. And I gained a firm appreciation for my partner’s teaching, how she fostered interest in old yet timeless books and world views and elicited creative and engaged responses to her assignments. I felt proud when I commented on the students’ work and found areas of agreement with her. I felt humbled—and edified—as I began to see other aspects of their work through her eyes. In other words, partitioning the material and methods into a half-sized course on its own was a unique learning opportunity for me as well as for our students.

Simply juxtaposing the material and methods of two, or more, disciplines does not make for an integrative studies course, though. When I began teaching that semester—Linnaeus and Darwin were points of overlap for us—Sandy was more involved than I had been, questioning and even challenging students during class. When I discussed scientific models, she talked about literary metaphors. We read the poems and science fiction she had suggested. She was exploring and demonstrating ways to integrate course content, to combine the tools and methods of science and the humanities, to harmonize our voices. Nevertheless, in an offhand comment after the semester, she said, “You could teach my half of the course, but I could never teach yours.” Maybe she was referring to the jargon in the scientific articles or the way that contemporary biology is built upon layers of accumulated knowledge, accumulated over many decades, but the idea terrified me, and I disagreed vehemently, much more so than with anything she’d said all semester.

On this, I was correct. Not only because I had no expertise in what she was teaching, but because, as we would discover together through the subsequent offerings, what the course needed was both of our perspectives, and not partitioned into halves but rather integrated into a learning experience that combined both perspectives, both disciplines.

Conjunctions and Evolutions

Then COVID-19 forced rethinking, despite the onset of the pandemic and the switch to remote learning occurring at the midpoint of our semester and, thus, between the two parts of the course. In the next offering, though, as we have previously discussed (2021), the realities of the coronavirus and of how it spurred the rapid implementation of new technologies, realities so distant from the classical and medieval world, demanded we de-chronologize the syllabus, mix the two parts, learn how to bring the science and literature closer and closer together, experimenting with varied methods that would shift between what each of us sees to create a new vision.

That new vision, incidentally, would inevitably change how we would teach courses alone, courses we had taught before, in some cases for many years. Those changes included reading student work with a broader lens, interrogating what research means, or could mean. Bryan discovered and began to emphasize connections between science and ethics, history, and philosophy. Sandy gained an understanding of how scientists “see” and look for ways of communicating their sometimes invisible worlds through models and metaphoric language. In addition to learning the value of integrating diverse perspectives, Bryan learned to encourage creativity and divergent thinking in science and beyond. And Sandy learned to recognize creativity in order and linearity.

Arriving at this new vision took learning how to work together, when and how to question, when and how to come to agreement. It took grasping what research looks like in one another’s fields, and what achievement looks like for students in different disciplines. It took a commitment to not only including but integrating the other’s field into one’s own. It took, in other words, a different kind of work than that involved with developing a course (whether a full-semester course or half of a course) alone in one’s own discipline. Below, we offer our methods for building an integrative course.

Getting it Together: Methods

Preparing an interdisciplinary course with equal input from those with different disciplinary expertise is one way to determine how—or if—both areas have not only been “included” but critically reviewed, corrected, and revised before being “published,” as syllabi, and taught. The process of working on the syllabus together and checking its integration, followed by exchanges on each day’s lesson will demonstrate, as well as focus on, each discipline’s methodologies and critical approaches. A master syllabus may be developed, or serve as a working document, but each successive iteration of a specific interdisciplinary course needs to undergo regular review and revision with both instructors weighing in on what needs to be there, or doesn’t need to be.

Communication is key. Before each class, for example, one instructor might begin by proposing an outline for a lesson based on the readings listed on the syllabus for that day. Then the other instructor would respond to what has been proposed, addressing the works from their own disciplinary perspective. The additions, corrections, and qualifications to whatever the other has proposed may come in numerous ways: track changes, marginal comments, colored fonts, emails, texts, phone calls, meetings, whatever.

This approach extends to assessing student work. Ideally, in an interdisciplinary course, there are not “science” assignments and “humanities” or “arts” assignments that are neatly divided for the purposes of grading as if they were compartmentalized assembly line work—an approach that could no doubt halve the grading and require less effort, but in so doing would lose the benefit of distinct and contrasting points of view that represent a truly integrative approach. It is impossible to avoid approaching each student submission from one’s distinct disciplinary point of view. Indeed, while the objectives for the course, using the university’s language for general education objectives (Penn State University), state that the course will facilitate learning through:

Integrative Thinking – the ability to synthesize knowledge across multiple domains, modes of inquiry, historical periods, and perspectives, as well as the ability to identify linkages between existing knowledge and new information. Individuals who engage in integrative thinking are able to transfer knowledge within and beyond their current contexts.

Key Literacies – the ability to identify, interpret, create, communicate and compute using materials in a variety of media and contexts. Literacy acquired in multiple areas, such as textual, quantitative, information/technology, health, intercultural, historical, aesthetic, linguistic (world languages), and scientific, enables individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, to lead healthy and productive lives, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.

Those objectives also assert that after completing the course, students will have increased their ability to:

Explain the methods of inquiry in humanities fields and describe how the contributions of these fields complement inquiry in other areas; demonstrate competence in critical thinking about topics and texts in the humanities through clear and well-reasoned responses; and demonstrate knowledge of major cultural currents, issues, and developments through time, including evidence of exposure to unfamiliar material that challenges their curiosity and stretches their intellectual range.

Explain the methods of inquiry in the natural science fields and describe how the contributions of these fields complement inquiry in other areas; construct evidence-based explanations of natural phenomena; and demonstrate informed understandings of scientific claims and their applications.

Thus, in these latter descriptions, the emphasis remains exclusively centered on and concerned with individual “domains”—my place, your place, rather than our place. This orientation is what makes co-teaching with those from “domains” other than one’s own so crucial. Fears that one domain will be scanted, shunted, neglected or marginalized are addressed in the collaborative design. A course that is “ours” is invested in the idea of a pedagogy that valorizes multiple points of view.

Assessing student work is one way to understand how faculty trained in different disciplines see, evaluate, and represent their disciplinary response to what students produce. The comparison of those assessments can also be reassuring in their similarities of observations. Comments to students on the strengths and weaknesses of their work will inevitably vary in style, tone, and approach, distinguishing and individuating the voice of each instructor; and yet, without intending to, they may come to similar conclusions, even when coming at the student work from distinct points of view.

Those who teach college composition have likely heard students self-identifying as science or engineering majors to justify missing sources, or weak development, or vague sentences, or unclear structure of whatever the English teacher seems to be looking for. That industry scientists and engineers—not just academic ones—write as much as any English major comes as a surprise to many prospective students in those fields. Suggesting students meet with a scientist to discuss written work intended for an English class may seem a risk, but interdisciplinary teaching requires trust, and the recognition from, say, an English teacher, that science faculty are critical readers, even outside their discipline. Indeed, this kind of referral can be the start of exploring more extended collaborations, including co-teaching. That is what preceded the development of the course discussed here: Sandy recommended that a student talk to his biology professor, Bryan, about an essay related to his interest in science; the student subsequently returned to composition class with the news that he had said the same thing as she had. Though she had never even met Bryan, she started thinking about that kind of collaboration. A seed was planted.

Teaching with someone in another field, and assessing student work individually, can be both humbling and reassuring: humbling when surprised by what one didn’t notice; reassuring when the co-teacher experiences something similar—“I didn’t notice that, and that seems to be important.” It is important, too, for students to hear the distinct voice and subject position of each instructor in separate comments on the same assignment, rather than alternating or blending responses assignment to assignment or student to student that inevitably obscure or homogenize the individual focus and expression of each. Students, of course, may not see the subtle differences in responses to their written work, and it is highly unlikely that any two teachers, even in the same field, will say exactly, or even close to, what the other does. Nevertheless, while each instructor might cite different strengths or details or evidence in their separate grade comments, the effect on the student when teachers in different fields come to similar conclusions as to the overall effectiveness of a response can be powerful. Before uploading or appending comments to any graded work, though, instructors would, ideally, first exchange their comments and suggested grades with one another. In so doing, each instructor also learns in yet another way something about what matters to their co-instructor: for example, how much the articulation or the application is weighed, how much the presentation or the depth; which details are most persuasive or imperative or irrelevant, and on and on.

In other words, to reinforce the shared sense of responsibility for assessing how the disciplinary requirements in all fields have been met, students—and teachers—benefit from hearing different voices, even if they “say the same thing.” If the assignment itself is interdisciplinary by design, the range of responses may also be accounted for by how the student does or does not address what matters in the field of each of the instructors, namely, what either one expected would be addressed. Take this assignment:

Reading: Ovid, 8 AD, Metamorphoses. “The Primal Chaos-Separation of the Elements,” I.1-31; “Other Species are Generated,” I.416-437 (verse and prose translations).
ca. 1200, The Aberdeen Bestiary. “Creation” and “Adam Names …”
Yong, 2014, “The Unique Merger That Made You (and Ewe, and Yew),” Nautilus.

Journal 2: Write your own story account or narrative poem describing the origin of creatures or a creature. Incorporate elements from the three readings. Then write a short analysis that explains what you intended to do, how you did it, and why. (Feinstein and Wang, Beasts, 27 Jan 2025)

The reading includes distinct, seemingly unrelated representations of creation. The journal exercise asks for a “creative” narrative in order to reinforce how form and vehicle, in relation to time period and place, themselves differ, matter, and inform origin stories and theories. The requirement is to integrate not only Judeo-Christian and classical representations but also contemporary scientific arguments, followed by an analysis of the creative effort, how it was done, what one intended or hoped to demonstrate, and why. The exercises, projects, and readings being interdisciplinary, the grading would necessarily consider how well the understanding of the disparate texts are conveyed in the analysis of the creative effort.

Assignments like this one are important, but insufficient, of course. No single product can adequately express the acquisition of science skills, humanities skills, and, especially, comprehension of the distinct methods and purposes of the different “domains.” Different kinds of assignments, those specifically identified with the methodologies, knowledge, and literacies of the different fields, reinforce the nascent lessons and experiments, build on one another, and, in sum, seek to address the disciplinary and integrative objectives of the course.

In Closing

We continue to see teaching and co-teaching in an ever-changing light. Our evolving perspective is a product of learning how to work together, grasping what scholarly achievement looks like in one another’s fields, and committing not only to each of our fields but to bringing them closer together. It informs how we understand and approach our individual disciplines; and it has changed the way we have taught even our discipline-specific courses on our own. And it has changed the way we have taught together: every offering of Beasts has included not only new readings and assignments, but reconsidered teaching philosophies, expanded practices, and a renewed appreciation for interdisciplinarity.

Teaching in a way that truly integrates multiple disciplines and seemingly disparate points of view has only increased in importance since we began teaching together seven years ago. Not only has pressure built to economize, resulting in specialization and disciplinary hierarchies, but talking across the aisle, as it were, seems particularly urgent: we need to engage one another, to work together, for to do so will contribute to a richer teaching and learning endeavor, and a more generous one, for recognizing that the world in which we live and thrive depends on all of us and our varied ways of seeing.