Presentation:

Part I: Overview of Designing Matter (Cassandra Fraser)

This case study presents the “Designing Matter” course at the University of Virginia as envisioned and facilitated by session leader Cassandra Fraser. Professor Fraser developed Designing Matter to engender cross-disciplinary conversations between science and non-science students and faculty by embedding science topics within their ethical and social contexts. Focusing on how humans design, interact with, shape, and understand matter across the length scales from the smallest subatomic particles to the universe as a whole, the course wove together the sciences of matter, the arts of design, and the ethics of material manipulation into a holistic and socially relevant discussion.

As the first offering of the “Common Course” initiative in the University’s College of Arts and Sciences, Designing Matter received funding from the Carnegie Foundation’s “Teachers for a New Era” program. To meet the goals of this program, the Common Courses cast the future primary school teacher as the model undergraduate liberal arts student. These future teachers need an education that is both broad and deep; their knowledge must cross countless disciplinary divides as they forge connections between diverse fields while also developing deep knowledge of traditional subject matter. By focusing on matter and the ethics of manipulating it, all students—even the most advanced science majors—encountered new material in the course. For many, Designing Matter provided a unique opportunity to study “real-world” cutting edge science and all its ethical and social implications.

In the spirit of this year’s Reinvention Center theme, “Undergraduate Education and the Multiple Functions of the Research University,” Designing Matter brought together undergraduate students from many majors, faculty and graduate students from numerous departments, nationally known scholars and artists, and local community members. By engaging these various populations in different capacities, Designing Matter highlighted the University’s many functions: educating undergraduates, providing professional development opportunities for graduate students, conducting cutting-edge research, community outreach, and forging ties to other institutions to help build and maintain an international scholarly community.

From a course design perspective, Designing Matter had several components:

• Weekly two-hour class sessions
• Discussion sections
• Proposal workshops (offered weekly; two required per semester)
• Weekly TA meetings

The designing matter theme was explored through weekly presentations by distinguished faculty and speakers from across the disciplines. Session topics were organized by order of magnitude, ranging from subatomic to astronomical length scales. Some subjects, however, refused to adhere to this linear “small to large” framework and thus provided especially compelling opportunities to examine connections between dimensions. The class met for two hours on Tuesday evenings and sessions were open to the public.

Dr. Fraser developed a set of questions about the design process and matter lifecycle for course participants and speakers to consider. These questions required the speakers to address their own matter-related work, and how it operates within social and ethical networks. Several of these questions were inspired by the work of William McDonough and Michael Braungart as presented in their book Cradle to Cradle (2002).

For some sessions, faculty members from different disciplines co-lectured to examine the topic from multiple perspectives, highlighting the importance of cross-disciplinary approaches to real world problems. For example, Dr. Carl Berg and Dr. Douglas Desimone teamed up to discuss the newest strategies for treating damaged tissues through organ transplantation and regenerative medicine, which is dependent upon a fundamental understanding of morphogenesis. Advances in these basic science and applied fields may affect where organs and tissues come from in the future. Similarly, Dr. Deborah Johnson and Dr. David Luebke collaborated to discuss computer animation and the ethics of creating realistic images that blur our ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

In addition to the weekly class sessions, students attended weekly discussion sections led by graduate teaching assistants and undergraduate project consultants. In the first offering of Designing Matter in 2004, these sections served as a place to discuss course content, clarify assignments, and provide guidance with proposal writing. These proposals, modeled after the National Science Foundation grant proposal guide and adapted for undergraduates, were the primary semester assignment. Running proposal workshops within discussion sections limited the time that could be devoted to discussion of ideas. Therefore, in 2005 discussion sections and proposal workshops were separated and offered at different times. The merits and drawbacks of these two approaches are investigated below.

Dr. Fraser and the graduate teaching assistants also met every Wednesday morning following Tuesday evening class sessions to prepare for discussion sections, discuss ideas, assess the course and plan for the upcoming weeks. These meetings proved invaluable for making mid-semester adjustments to better meet student needs. They also provided a place for cross-disciplinary knowledge sharing among the teaching team since no single teacher was an expert in every lecture topic. Each instructor brought different techniques to bear in addressing challenges and devising creative solutions. The undergraduate project consultants periodically joined the weekly teaching team meetings and their insights about course workload and assignment structure proved especially important.

Finally, a Designing Matter Website (www.designingmatter.net) was created to serve as a clearinghouse for course information and a venue for showcasing excellent student project ideas and other creative work. The Website provides a dynamic space in which conversations about matter design extend beyond the spatial and temporal confines of the classroom to connect the Designing Matter project to interested individuals and communities, both local and geographically remote.

Presentation Part II: Redesigning Designing Matter (Jennifer Aultman)

Ms. Aultman, a graduate teaching assistant for the Designing Matter course in 2004, led a workshop and discussion for the second part of the breakout session. Participants were asked to divide into small groups and address the following questions.

• Could you use the Designing Matter theme for a course at your own institution? How would you tweak the course as presented by Dr. Fraser to suit your own needs and interests and those of your students? How would you structure the course?
• In teaching a Designing Matter type course, what resources could you draw on at your particular institution? Where might financial and other types of support come from?
• What challenges would such a course pose at your institution? Are there barriers to interdisciplinary teaching or inviting faculty as guest speakers?

The main points that were raised during these small group workshops and the ensuing large group conversation are summarized below under the Discussion section of this document.

Presentation Part III: Projects and Proposals (Ray Malewitz)

Creating a research project based upon designing matter constituted the central assignment for students in the course. Training students to write realizable National Science Foundation style proposals required significant time investment by the teaching team, and developing the project ideas demanded a great deal of effort from the students. They were encouraged to consider interdisciplinary projects and many chose to work collaboratively with another student.

The proposal assignment addressed a number of problems that plague current early undergraduate education.

• Since the 1960s, students have become more vocal about what they consider a growing trend toward specialization within their educational experiences. This trend leaves little room for the kind of sweeping, interdisciplinary, engaged thought that previously composed a liberal arts education. Encouraging students to cultivate deep knowledge of a discipline while actively forging connections between it and other fields provides them with rich, well-balanced educational experiences. This type of contextualized scholarship increases students’ abilities to contribute meaningful work with broad impact.
• Students are often unaware of the relationship between their work in a course of study and the problems that they recognize within their local, national, and global communities. This disconnect can foster political and social apathy or cynicism on the national and global level.
• High school and early college educational experiences often center upon what may be called intellectually dead areas of a particular discipline. Current research often takes a back seat to pre-established solutions to pre-established problems of the type found in the back of science textbooks. Students rarely encounter the living problems that remain unsolved for a particular discipline and are given few opportunities to consider why those problems should matter.

Requiring students to formulate grant proposals offers a solution to each of these problems. Developing project ideas encourages students to define new topics of inquiry related to their own interests and to suggest logical procedures by which they can investigate them. It is challenging, though, to rapidly familiarize students with the procedures of proposal writing.

To a certain extent, the format of the Designing Matter lectures provided assistance in this task. Students heard from distinguished scholars about a wide variety of research projects and methods. The Designing Matter teaching team also drafted a grant proposal guide that walked the students through the grant writing process from identifying a research topic, exploring the background and significance, outlining a project plan, considering resources and budgetary concerns, formatting the actual grant proposal document, and writing an abstract and designing a visually compelling graphic to be shared with others on the Website.

While the lectures and the grant proposal guide proved pedagogically important, the bulk of the students’ training in grant writing happened through group dialogue. These dialogues took two forms. During the first year, the teaching team introduced the proposal framework in discussion sections. By integrating lecture-based discussions and proposal mechanics, this approach reinforced the connections between the format of the course and its expected product. Many students developed their proposal ideas in the midst of lively discussion, applying the disciplinary ideas of the week to their own interests. The difficulty with this approach was striking proper balance between discussions of lecture-based ideas and pragmatic concerns of proposal writing.

During the second year, proposal writing guidance occurred outside the discussion setting in a series of weekly workshops run by graduate teaching assistants. Many students applauded the singular focus of these workshops and the compartmentalization of tasks. The difficulties of implementing this approach included time management and the integration of the three fundamental components of the course: weekly lectures, discussion, and the proposal. Some students found that the independent project exceeded the expected workload that the course’s three-credit designation suggested, especially with proposal workshops in addition to lecture and discussion.

An attractive way to address these issues would be to add a one-credit lab to the course and concentrate the proposal work there. This could provide an opportunity for collaboration between academic and administrative branches of the university by drawing upon the considerable expertise present in institutional bodies such as libraries, career centers, service learning and volunteer programs, teaching resource centers, grants management and accounting offices, and alumni and community relations divisions, for instance. This approach has many potential benefits and merits testing.

These structural challenges did not overshadow the wonderful project proposals generated by students. Below are four innovative and exciting examples.

• “Virtual Jam Sessions.” A third-year computer science student in the Engineering School proposed to create a “software system that allows composers and performers of music to participate in informal and formal sessions across a distributed computer network in real-time.”
• “Energizing the Elected.” A pair of fourth-year students from political and social thought and from poverty studies designed a potential nonprofit organization that “aims to explore and then bridge the information gap that exists between environmental scientists and policymakers when dealing with energy policy.” This group researched the mechanics of Political Action Group formation and outlined the specific ways that this PAC differed from like-minded groups and what new information it would provide.
• “Chemical Reaction Mechanisms: An Internet Compilation.” A second-year chemistry student proposed an internet compilation of chemical reaction mechanisms, promising a database of “educational relevance to students by allowing them to learn the concepts of organic reactivity and selectivity in a visual and intuitive way rather than through rote memorization.” The student asserted that the compilation would “also be of scientific relevance to synthetic chemists by serving as a reference source from which they can obtain mechanistic information they can then use to tune their reactions.”
• “Printmaking Detox.” A second-year art student investigated and proposed an alternative means of intaglio printmaking that would eliminate certain hazardous chemicals required by the current process. The project was also intended to “help artists by informing them of the potential hazards involved in intaglio printmaking” by providing “information about safer alternative materials that may be used to make prints” and encouraging “artists to utilize these options in order to protect their own health and help preserve the environment.”

Some of the most compelling projects involved collaboration between students rooted in disparate fields of study. The fact that many students chose such projects suggests that they are interested in exploring ideas from multi-disciplinary perspectives and enjoy working in this way. Moreover, the commitment to community evident in each case—a community of musicians, politicians, chemists, or printmakers—reveals that students are far from apathetic or cynical.

Discussion:

In our discussion, participants posed questions about how Designing Matter fit into the University’s academic structure. The course was set apart from specific departments through its Common Course designation, but still fulfilled a science distribution requirement. Participants noted that making an interdisciplinary course meet distribution requirements—especially if it could satisfy multiple requirements—would make it especially attractive to students and administrators.

Dr. Fraser mentioned that the enrollment of Designing Matter was originally expected to reach over three hundred, but that it never exceeded one hundred students. Session participants stressed the importance of educating faculty who advise undergraduates about interdisciplinary courses like Designing Matter so they can encourage students to take advantage of these special opportunities. Courses listed under special mnemonics otherwise may face enrollment problems since they will not attract a natural audience of students looking for classes within a particular department. For Designing Matter, the teaching team also took charge of advertising by posting flyers in locations frequented by students, and distributing information electronically and by word of mouth to particular student networks, classmates and friends.

The discussion repeatedly raised the issue of the sustainability of a course like Designing Matter. Students competed for grants to carry out their projects after the end of the semester. As Dr. Fraser noted, the fact that the proposal competition was real added a significant dimension to the class and encouraged students to put forth their very best work in the proposals. A funding source is, of course, necessary to support this component of the class and catalyze this high level of student engagement. Session participants wondered whether Designing Matter and similar courses might best be sustained as two-semester “introduction to the university” sequences. The first semester, structured like Designing Matter, could provide an excellent introduction to the university, various faculty members and their research interests, and to broader university resources. A second semester follow-up might allow students time and support to begin the research they had proposed in the first semester of the course. Another option raised would be to offer the course in the spring and have a structured undergraduate research experience the following summer, in which students who wished to execute their projects could enroll for credit. In each of these cases, the scope of the proposed projects would have to be carefully managed to help set up the students for successful follow-through, with reporting on progress and findings. In some respects, limiting the scope of projects conflicts with the original idea for Designing Matter, which was to provide students with an opportunity to explore an ambitious matter related topic and “dream project” of their own choosing. A summer follow-up for interested students might best shepherd this creative spirit.

Another sustainability issue raised was whether faculty should be expected to contribute guest lectures semester after semester without any compensation or teaching “credit”. This question poses a compelling problem for any university that encourages interdisciplinary partnerships in the governance of a course. A couple of possible solutions emerged in discussion, such as making these classes high enrollment so that departments can more easily justify letting their faculty team teach. Another possible solution (which would require greater institutional investment) is to change the way teaching credit is assigned to faculty. A system that more easily permits team teaching and even provides credit for guest lecturing in other courses would encourage more faculty members to teach across disciplinary lines.

In her presentation, Dr. Fraser briefly raised Designing Matter’s development potential and the topic resurfaced in discussion. The model of South Carolina’s “Citizen School of Nanotechnology” was mentioned, reinforcing the idea that courses like Designing Matter are ideal for citizen scholars. Professor Fraser also noted that lectures for courses like Designing Matter, that showcase distinguished faculty and cutting edge research, scholarship and creative arts, could also easily constitute a community-based or even a traveling lecture series intended to educate, advertise institutional strengths, and increase development opportunities. Designing Matter lectures were also videotaped as an educational resource and historical record. High quality videos could be distributed or sold as DVDs, steamed over the Web, or downloaded as podcasts.

Finally, some participants were excited about the interdisciplinary nature and structure of Designing Matter but had other ideas for similar course themes. One idea proposed was a course centered on Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999), and another participant suggested a course centered on computation and modeling across the disciplines. Finally, as one session participant noted, Designing Matter easily merges with issues of theology and the infinite. Emphasizing these topics could provide other fascinating manifestations of the Designing Matter course and given the current “intelligent design vs. evolution” debate, emphasizing biological design might also prove particularly fruitful.

Recommendations:

General Institutional Recommendations:
In summary, session participants agreed that interdisciplinary courses like Designing Matter function at their best with significant institutional support. Special recognition for interdisciplinary courses, perhaps as separate course mnemonics or as part of special certificate programs, is appropriate. Additionally, universities wishing to encourage cross-disciplinary teaching and to build community in this way should investigate alternative ways to credit faculty for participation in team-taught courses and for guest lecturing in interdisciplinary programs.

Also, institutional support for student project proposals is important; where monetary support is not available to fund projects, perhaps interested students could enroll in for-credit follow-up courses that would provide structure and support as they carry out their research projects, or at least some manageable piece of them, independently. However, the real beauty of the student grant proposal project is the creativity and opportunity for collaboration it fosters even without project execution. Since, realistically, only a few students will have the time or financial resources to realize their projects, recognizing grant proposal formulation as a worthwhile endeavor in itself is the most financially sustainable and intellectually invigorating option.

Specific Institutional Recommendations:

1. Interdisciplinary courses require particular institutional support mechanisms not in place at many schools. We advocate that schools develop special designations for interdisciplinary courses (especially those that are co-taught or require significant investment by multiple faculty members). These designations could take many forms: special course mnemonics, special interdisciplinary certificate programs, formal programs for introductory interdisciplinary sequences, or any number of other possibilities.
2. At most institutions, faculty who co-teach or guest lecture for other courses are not allotted full teaching credit for that work. Institutions that support special interdisciplinary course series or programs need to find alternative ways to count faculty teaching loads to encourage co-teaching and/or guest lecturing (the latter of which, at most institutions, currently carries no teaching credit with it at all).

References/Resources:

Publications
Diamond, J. (1999) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

McDonough, W. and Braungart, M. (2002) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press.

Websites
Designing Matter course Website (featuring work by participating artists): www.designingmatter.net