Encouraging Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Engagement: A Case Study of Biology in Text and Film

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, we describe an interdisciplinary course entitled ‘Biologies in Text and Film,’ co-taught by a literary historian and biological scientist. In our course, we use dark science fiction film and texts, as well as biology content, to unpack the ways scientific knowledge is entangled in social and narrative paradigms and vice versa. We first describe our course’s theoretical positioning, which adapts a medical humanities framework. Our positioning breaks from an existing science-via-fiction approach that prioritises the teaching of science at the expense of a more holistic discussion of narrative and science’s social entanglements. Our course uniquely and substantively meets both literary and biology learning outcomes. We provide our four-stage course structure: breadcrumbing, deep-diving, interpretation, and application. We believe this approach can help humanities and STEM students to engage with high-stakes wicked problems through a disciplinary blending that leads students to a more robust understanding of how our real and imagined world(s) are entangled.