Understanding and mitigating contemporary environmental problems requires basic and applied knowledge drawn from a diversity of scientific and non-scientific disciplines. As such, an appropriate curricular response by undergraduate institutions is to design environmental science programs that train the next generation of scientists to have a breadth of scientific knowledge that transcends a single discipline, despite a common requirement for students to select a particular disciplinary focus within the program (e.g., biology, chemistry, geology, geography). Nonetheless, faculty and students alike often comment that they gradually lose sight of the interdisciplinary connections within the field of environmental science after their initial introductory courses in environmental science are completed. Our hypothesis for this lack of interdisciplinary connection is that students lack personal experience and real-world examples of how several disciplines collaborate on a particular environmental issue. Here, we describe the development and implementation of a research project that is specifically designed to promote interdisciplinary connections and collaboration among faculty and students across the curriculum in an environmental science program.
Results/Conclusions
Our project is designed to focus on understanding the biological, chemical, and physical attributes and conservation value of field boundary strips nested within an agricultural matrix in the Ridge and Valley physiographic province of Pennsylvania. The separate components of the project are distributed logically across the curriculum of the Environmental Science program at Kutztown University such that students gain repeated exposure to a research project from different disciplinary angles. For instance, first-year students in introductory courses are introduced to the premise of the project in lecture and then establish experimental units and sampling plots in lab. Later in upper-level courses in biology, chemistry, and geology, students collect data and samples (e.g., soil cores) in the field and conduct biological or chemical analyses in a diversity of field and wet labs designed around the experimental goals. We have incorporate project-specific lab activities in five courses spanning four scientific disciplines to promote the interdisciplinary nature of environmental science. The initial response by faculty and students is positive. We feel our project serves as a malleable framework for other institutions to foster substantive examples of cross-discipline collaboration in the process of preparing undergraduates for careers in environmental science.