The Humanities Lab prioritizes instruction by way of faculty development, funding, and providing teaching resources. The Lab aims to invigorate undergraduate and graduate interest, developing expertise, curriculum in interdisciplinary integration in humanistic, social scientific, and stem coursework. We see value in incorporating the practice of collaboration in research into instruction, and thus aim to foster faculty working together in different degrees to provide students with unique learning experiences. Co-teaching affords the benefits to both students and faculty, such that everyone benefits from complementary pedagogical practices and disciplinary expertise. To foster this remaining of teaching and learning, the lab offers three mechanisms to support instruction, which operate under the auspices of Lehigh’s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL).
Course moments: provide one mechanism for science, business, and engineering faculty who want to enhance their existing coursework to include scheduled participation of humanities faculty, drawing on Lehigh’s strengths in humanities faculty and their diverse range of expertise. This participation may take the form of guest lectures, co-taught modules, or—in the spirit of what is traditionally understood as a lab component in STEM course—interactive praxis. These moments allow the integration of new contexts and perspectives, such as having a business course include a guest lecture from an ethicist who challenges students to consider the human or societal consequences of the management practices they study, or bringing in a rhetoric scholar to discuss the language and argumentative mechanism of a primary research article being discussed in a biology class. This approach has been developed with much success in Professor Vassie Ware and Ann Fink’s Biosciences in the 21st Century (to offer one example).
First-Year Seminars model and implement the Lab’s mission by bringing two faculty from different disciplines together to immerse students into an exigent theme. These seminars emphasize skills in critical reading and writing, advancing fluency and accuracy of language, expression, argument, and research methods through close engagement with humanist perspectives. They aim to introduce an interdisciplinary taste for thinking about complex problems from different perspectives, which is designed to guide students’ course selection in the years that follow. Topics might include “Immunity and Community,” “The Problem with Plastics,” “Infrastructure: The Materials and Ideas of Organization.” In contrast to course moments which include external lectures or modules, first year seminars will be co-taught classes where faculty share full responsibility for every aspect of every module.
Integrated Gateway Experiences extend the objectives and philosophy of integrated first-year seminars across the curriculum in introductory and upper-level coursework. These workshops support new course development in two forms: 1) First, new humanities courses that intentionally target STEM and business students who, looking for career relevance, often discount the value of humanities distributions when choosing their courses. To do so, the workshop will draw on insight from faculty in business, engineering, and health, helping develop a pitch and outcome most relevant to students who traditionally don’t consider humanistic coursework beyond basic requirements. 2) Second, new courses that will be co-taught by from difference disciplines or colleges. Faculty who create these courses together can use their collaborations in fulfillment of teaching responsibilities and help flesh out ideas, research agenda, future working groups, including interdisciplinary research opportunities for undergraduates.