An astronomer, biologist, geologist, and anthropologist walk into a classroom. It’s not the beginning of a joke—it’s the interdisciplinary “Big Ideas” experience.

Big Ideas courses at the University of Iowa are team-taught courses exploring a “big idea,” led by faculty members from several different areas of expertise. These ideas are so big, they can’t be fully answered by a single discipline.

The first course, designed by Physics & Astronomy Professor Cornelia Lang, is an example of such an essential, and huge, inquiry: Origins of Life in the Universe, which explores the beginnings of existence along a narrative timeline. Along with Physics & Astronomy, other instructors of the course come from the Departments of Biology, Earth & Environmental Sciences, and Anthropology.

The concept was born when Lang was teaching the popular astronomy course, Life in the Universe. The course touched on other subjects, like DNA, or geoscience, or other ways of considering the history of planet earth. As an astronomer, she realized that students had more detailed questions about other disciplines than she could answer. And like a big bang, the Origins of Life in the Universe course was born, in the fall of 2013. Other courses followed, and plans are under way for more courses to follow next. The Big Ideas team has put out a call for faculty proposals for new courses for the series, which are designed to be part of the UI’s core General Education curriculum.

In 2015-16, Big Ideas course offerings included:

• People and the Environment: Technology, Culture and Social Justice
  (Anthropology; Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, Urban & Regional Planning, Geographical & Sustainability Sciences, College of Engineering)
• Equality, Opportunity, and Public Policy in America
  (History, Sociology, Political Science, Public Policy Center, outside guest speakers/visitors)
• History and Science of Oil
• (Earth & Environmental Sciences, History, outside guest speakers/visitors)
• Creativity for a Lifetime (Art & Art History, College of Nursing, Social Work, Rhetoric, College of Public Health, Art Education)

Big Ideas courses follow an “inquiry-guided” format: rather than giving students a lecture full of content to memorize, instructors pose questions to the students, or allow them to pose their own questions. These might be, “How did the sun form?” or “Why is the sky blue?” Then, the instructors spend some of the class time bouncing ideas off each other, modeling for the students how their professors might go about answering those questions from the perspectives of multiple disciplines. No other institution within the Big Ten offers such courses to fulfill core curriculum, making Big Ideas unique.

“Our goal is to give students skills they can use in other classes, and allow them to practice interdisciplinary work themselves so they can use it in their other classes at Iowa,” Lang said.

Junior and geoscience major Hanna Grissel said the course design made it easy to become engaged.

“The format – exploring multiple disciplines, while following a narrative – has the potential to be exhilarating for students, and makes all the ideas and studies presented seem so much more accessible,” she said.

Samantha Kaplan, a junior and an elementary education and psychology major, agreed.

“Because this course did cover a lot of material, it was important for me to not only show up and pay attention in class, but to be actively engaged,” she said. “I would ask questions if I needed some clarification, take notes on what we were covering, and when we did group work, I made sure to be a contributing member.”

In class, students went to the roof of Van Allen Hall and looked at the sun through telescopes, visited the Eastern Iowa Observatory to look at the stars and distant planets, and even took a field trip to the Field Museum and Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

Senior Drew Hutchinson said he wasn’t sure what to expect, going into Origins of Life. But he found the course sparked his interest in geoscience, now his major.

“When we covered human origins, we got to look at different skulls of past hominids,” he said. “I became fascinated in a topic that I didn’t even know I was going to be learning about."

All Big Ideas courses fulfill a UI undergraduate general education requirement. Those involved with Big Ideas hope to have one-quarter of all incoming freshmen enrolled in a Big Ideas course, which would amount to about 1,500 students per year.

Kaplan said having a general education course with an active learning style helped her process material in a new way. Instead of accepting what she read at face value, she learned to do additional research, question the findings, and determine if they fit her overall knowledge on the subject.

“I find that I still do this now [three years later],” she said. “As a psychology major, it’s important to look at a variety of sources and really determine, personally, if I think the study did what it claimed to do. I learned best practices in this from Origins of Life.”

And best of all, Big Ideas courses make students excited to learn.

Grissel said Origins of Life heightened an interest in paleontology that she’s held since childhood, and also ignited a passion in the environmental sciences, especially geoscience.

Both Grissel and Hutchinson declared geoscience as a major after taking the course.

“I would strongly recommend this course to any incoming freshmen,” Hutchinson said. “It helped me find out what I want to do in the future, and did it in a way that made it fun to go to class.”

Grissel said the class inspired her to think about life in a new way.

“I’ve felt a more connected feeling to life after I was taught how absolutely astonishing it is that we are alive,” she said.

It’s what Big Ideas courses do best—teach students what it means to be alive, and how to spend that life deep in learning.

— Story by Nora Heaton; photos by Jill Tobin

Photos of an Origins of Life in the Universe class: