The Day the Classroom Flipped: Lessons Learned from Interdisciplinary Science Education Online

The Covid‐19 pandemic, evolving needs of students & mentors, and the drive for global educational equality are collectively shifting how courses are packaged/distributed, ushering a more holistic approach and blending of fields. We recently created interdisciplinary courses in chemical biology aimed at massive open online and small private levels. These courses cover biology, chemistry, & physics, and concepts underlying modern chemical‐biology tools. We discuss what we learned while creating/overseeing these courses: content optimization and maintaining material freshness while fostering a stimulating learning environment. We outline mechanisms that help sustain student attention throughout rapidly‐moving courses, how to integrate adaptability to students’ needs in the short & long term, and speculate how we could have improved. We believe this will be an important guide for anyone wanting to develop online learning formats ideal for nurturing interdisciplinary scientists of tomorrow.

A platform for stop flow gradient generation to investigate chemotaxis

The ability of artificial microswimmers to respond to external stimuli and the mechanistical details of their origins belong to the most disputed challenges in interdisciplinary science. Therein, the creation of chemical gradients is technically challenging, because they quickly level out due to diffusion. Inspired by pivotal stopped flow experiments in chemical kinetics, we show that microfluidics gradient generation combined with a pressure feedback loop for precisely controlling the stop of the flows, can enable us to study mechanistical details of chemotaxis of artificial Janus micromotors, based on a catalytic reaction. We find that these copper Janus particles display a chemotactic motion along the concentration gradient in both, positive and negative direction and we demonstrate the mechanical reaction of the particles to small forces deviations, explaining this behaviour.

A Sociology of Interdisciplinarity

In building upon the cases presented in Chaps. 10.1007/978-3-030-88455-0_2, 10.1007/978-3-030-88455-0_3, and 10.1007/978-3-030-88455-0_4, we develop a Sociology of Interdisciplinarity that draws our empirical insights together with resources from Science and Technology Studies (STS), in addition to Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Research Policy, Infrastructure Studies, Anthropology, and Philosophy of Science. The key novelty of this framework is using STS insights to unpick the dynamics and consequences of interdisciplinary science, which distinguishes us from decades of earlier interdisciplinarity studies and gaps in understanding. Moreover, we not only focus on individual scholars and their experiences but pay careful attention to the wider contexts of interdisciplinary research, such as the impacts of funding structures, different access to resources, and power relations. We are careful in our approach so that our units of analyses—which vary from research groups and projects to whole epistemic communities and research policies—are most appropriate for the problem definitions that we put forward. The framework rests on a set of six dimensions, which we discuss in relation to current debates in the literature and our empirical analyses.

Rethinking Learning: What the Interdisciplinary Science Tells Us

Theories of learning developed in education and psychology for the past 100 years are woefully inadequate to support the design of schools and classrooms that foster deep learning and equity. Needed is learning theory that can guide us in creating schools and classrooms where deep learning occurs, where learners’ full selves are engaged, and that disrupt existing patterns of inequality and oppression. In this article, we build on recent research in education, neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology to articulate a theory of learning that has the potential to move us toward that goal. We elaborate four key principles of learning: (1) learning is rooted in evolutionary, biological, and neurological systems; (2) learning is integrated with other developmental processes whereby the whole child (emotion, identity, cognition) must be taken into account; (3) learning is shaped in culturally organized practice across people’s lives; and (4) learning is experienced as embodied and coordinated through social interaction. Taken together, these principles help us understand learning in a way that foregrounds the range of community and cultural experiences people have throughout the life course and across the multiple settings of life and accounts for learning as set within systems of injustice.

Bioethical Quality of Life Concept Through the Eyes of Critics

Bioethics is an interdisciplinary science that deals with the moral aspects of medicine, biotechnology and the value of life in general. Quality of life concept is the basis for one of the models of bioethics. Its supporters understand the value of human life by relying on the categories of its qualitative characteristics. They argue that the value of life is relative and depends on certain criteria, and prove the permissibility to terminate it in some cases. Quality of life conception is criticized, above all, by those scholars who rely on religious ideas of the equal value and inviolability of all people’s lives. This article reveals several examples of such criticism in the works of Polish and American authors: T. Biesaga, H. Ciach, G. Hołub, P. Kieniewicz, R. P. George and P. Lee. Citing the arguments of that Christian thinkers, the author forms her own attitude to the problem. The ethical and ontological sources of quality of life concept, namely utilitarianism and naturalism, become the main object of criticism. It is significant that in the utilitarian appeal to maximize happiness as pleasure and calculate the gain or loss they see an attempt to establish the primacy of the overall well-being over an individual’s life as well as a reason for killing those individuals whose lives do not meet quality criteria and impair overall well-being. They also criticize such a consequence of the naturalistic view as reduction of the personality to its manifestations. The absence of such manifestations becomes for the supporters of the quality of life concept the basis for conclusion about a low quality of life of some individuals. One more critical remark towards the quality of life concept concern erasing of differences between humans and animals and their interests. The technocratic attitude that permits any manipulations of a human life if only they can be performed is criticized too. The author demonstrates that the fundamental fault of the quality of life concept which is criticized by all its opponents is a limited understanding of human nature and human life.