Increasing Faculty Involvement in the Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Learning Experience

Abstract

Synospis More and more, we see that advances in life sciences are made because of Interdisciplinary collaborations. These collaborations are the future—they are necessary to solve the world’s most pressing problems and grand challenges. But are we preparing the next generation of scientists and the community for this future? At the University level, a number of initiatives and studies have suggested the need to reintegrate biology education and have made arguments that for students to build core competencies in biology, their education needs to be interdisciplinary. At the K-12 level, progress is being made to make learning interdisciplinary through the implementation of the Next-Generation Science Standards (NGSS). As NGSS is implemented, it will fundamentally change life sciences education at the K-12 level. However, when seeing the effect these initiatives and studies have had on the courses offered to students for their undergraduate biology degree, they still appear to be often siloed, with limited integration across disciplines. To make interdisciplinary biology education more successful, we need biologists, who for one reason or another have not been part of these conversations in the past and are more involved. We also need to increase communication and collaboration between biologists and educational researchers.