SCIENCE LITERACY AS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PROJECT

It has been difficult to enlist the faculty of the natural sciences in the University Studies approach to general education. While some headway has been made, we have looked to a conceptual framework for understanding the sciences that suggest interdisciplinary avenues of approach. We have based our approach on scholarship in the field of science studies (where science, its practices, institutions, contexts and modes of representation in science curricula are the object of inquiry by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and others) and science education reform. We have piloted a literature-rich seminar that is structured on the presumption that science literacy adequate to the complexities of our day is interdisciplinary in nature. This is an approach that provides faculty not trained in the natural sciences way to tackle scientific practice while using the tools, concepts and methods of their own disciplines. The faculty response to the pilot seminar suggests that this is an approach to science literacy worth pursuing.