Engineering and pop-culturist instructors team-teach a first-year experience course exploring science through the lenses of history, literature, film, television, and sequential art. Authors present science fiction discourses as unique for synthesizing fields in the humanities and STEM, and they present curricular and co-curricular design…

An integrative tool that we have piloted in two LCs, the interdisciplinary index, is an integrative template that students use to make connections between disciplines. In the learning community, "Cli-Fi: Stories and Science of the Coming Climate Apocalypse," faculty developed the Climate-Change Stress Index (CCSI) that students used to…

Race for the Red Planet was designed by Daphne Fauber to teach engineering design principles through the contextualization of popular culture, science fiction, and the current race for Mars. The goal of the lesson was for students to learn how people may be living on Mars in the future through a variety of interdisciplinary sources and various…

Generally, cohorts or learning communities enrich higher learning in students. Learning communities consist of conventionally separate groups of students that meet together with common academic purposes and goals. Types of learning communities include paired courses with concurrent student enrollment, living-learning communities, and faculty…

This manuscript reports on findings from the implementation of the EU project "Science Fiction in Education" (Sci-Fi-Ed). The project provides teachers with tools, training, and guidance that will assist them in enhancing their teaching, making science more attractive to students, connecting it with real-life issues such as the…

Supplementing classroom instruction with online materials and learning activities is becoming less avant-garde and more of an expectation for faculty members in higher education. The use of Blackboard, WebCT, or proprietary software, like Georgia Institute of Technology's Sakai installation (T-Square), has become a requirement, rather than an…

Describes an attempt to combine secondary English instruction emphasizing United States literature with science and history by finding "common ground" between these disciplines in (1) the separation of truth from falsehood and (2) logical thinking. Biographies combined history and literature, and science fiction combined science and English;…

An undergraduate "Anthropology Through Science Fiction" honors course is described. Participation in the course was by invitation only and included both anthropology and non-anthropology majors. By using science fiction, non-anthropology students quickly became familiar with weekly topics and anthropology majors found the readings a new way to…

Columbus (Georgia) College's Challenge Squared program consists of three 2-week enrichment day camps for gifted students in grades 5 through 10. In past years, students have worked with an artist to create local history murals and have written and produced video plays in cooperation with a media specialist. Most recently, students were involved in…

Focuses on the uses of science fiction to teach sociology and develop critical and creative thinking. Maintains that in the last 20 years science fiction has become concerned increasingly with social themes. Concludes with a detailed description of the use of "The Handmaid's Tale" in an introductory sociology course. (MJP)

Continues an article that began in the summer 1995 "Interdisciplinary Humanities." Examines ethical concerns about nuclear power, societal control, and prejudice articulated in science fiction literature. Authors studied include Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Damon Knight. The earlier article covered literature concerned with ecology…

Thirty-six nontraditional undergraduate courses in linguistics are described. Course topics include: animal communication, bilingualism, sociolinguistics, introductory linguistics, language and formal reasoning, language and human conflict, language and power, language and sex, language and the brain, language planning, language typology and…