Art & Zoology | Zoology & Art: a case study of experiential interdisciplinary education

This is a case study of two undergraduate courses, one in art and the other in biology, that were designed as an interdisciplinary educational experience intended to meaningfully bridge gaps between disciplines and to provide students with perspectives and skills that can help mitigate the climate crisis. Globally, extinction rates are rising and biodiversity is decreasing at a pace that threatens to become the next mass extinction event in the next few hundred years unless we humans do better at preserving organisms and the environments in which they live. The need to rapidly gather a large quantity of natural history data, combined with a lack of professional field biologists to collect the data necessary, means that citizen science projects are increasingly important to amassing information for analysis by biologists and data scientists. We worked with the premise that artists and biologists are trained to be careful observers and accurate communicators, but for different outcomes, and that when given the opportunity to cross-train they could learn the value of citizen science, interdisciplinary learning, and collaboration—all skills that will be increasingly useful in an unstable future. We share our rationale for designing the course and the logistic hurdles overcome, provide a student-centered overview of course assignments and experiences, and offer an evaluation of the course’s objectives.