FHS tackles cell-to-society teaching through interdisciplinary course on blood

This spring, FHS’ Mark Lechner tackled the challenge of teaching “cell-to-society” through his undergrad course, “HSCI 372-3   Red, Hot, and True: A Semester of Blood.”

Lechner first got the inkling of developing a new interdisciplinary course when he found himself thinking, 'blood is a really good example of this' for a variety of concepts in biology and health.  He took on the challenge of exploring the number of different concepts that could be explained by blood and concluded that it was an extremely rich teaching point.  Another particular appealing aspect of focusing on blood was the wide variety of symbolic meanings it has in different cultures and how much blood is used in literature and film to represent life, death, and the human condition.  The combination of ideas and meanings conveyed by blood, along with its power to evoke visceral and vivid impressions, stimulated his keen interest in the subject.  The mental list quickly turned into an outline of topics for the course. Lechner reflects, “What I really liked about the notion of a course on blood was the integration of the concepts at different levels - they are all interrelated and work in this one special tissue.  Frankly, the range of ideas we could discuss made me believe that this would be a fun class to teach and that was additional motivation to develop it.” 

As a teacher, the experience of developing and teaching this course has given Lechner new insight into interdisciplinary thinking and learning. The course design focused on the synthesis of different concepts from different fields and prioritized this intention from design to implementation.  He feels that while blood is a special tissue, the concepts and interdisciplinary thinking emphasized in this course are readily transferable to any tissue and to a whole host of other subjects.  “The thing about interdisciplinary thinking is that it allows you to move between paradigms and not be confined with one perspective in which you try to make everything fit.  I purposely wanted to have a course that had something of value, some newly revealed dimensions for both BSc and BA majors in health sciences,” says Lechner (who also happens to be FHS’ Undergraduate Program Director).

How did the diverse students taking the class respond? Lechner heard from many of the students that they were surprised at how complex and multidimensional blood is.  He cites the class discussion of sickle cell anemia as an example of the intellectual journey the class took; initially the incomplete understanding of sickle cell anemia was used to reinforce the prejudices and stereotyping of African Americans and the misinformed designation and segregation of an inferior 'Negro Blood'.  Additional genetic evidence eventually showed that the sickle cell trait was actually a strength in that it afforded protection from malaria and that the trait was spread among many populations thanks to its beneficial effects under certain conditions.  To Lechner, bringing his students (with very diverse levels of science education) to an intersection of history, sociology, genetics, infectious disease, biochemistry, experimental medicine, commerce, eugenics, and ethics was a major interdisciplinary achievement.

“Cell-to-society” approaches influenced Lechner’s approach to evaluation for the course. Lechner had to spend considerable time during the course planning stages on determining what assessments to use and developing clear rubrics for the projects and assignments.  He favours using a variety of assessments to recognize differences in students learning and communication styles. For this course, a theme for the assessments was to answer the prompt 'what is blood?' and to answer in a way that could represent an understanding from cell-to-society.  One of the projects was to create a storyboard to represent a portion of this complexity in a creative way with pictures and texts.  Part of the instructions for the storyboard project was to think of communicating the information in way that 5th-8th graders could understand and remember it because the story is presented in a simple yet engaging fashion. "Students produced some truly imaginative and interactive storyboards and they far exceeded my expectations," Lechner observes.   (The photo shows Lechner holding the graphic novel style storyboard created by students Leandro Dela Cruz and Sarrah Vinluan)

Another unique feature of "A Semester of Blood" was that it required interacting with two HSCI lab courses (Immunology and Virology) to expose students to how laboratory science is done and how evidence is generated and evaluated.  Both of these lab courses study aspects of blood and Lechner believed it was a great opportunity to visit the teaching laboratory, see the equipment and reagents used, examine the experimental results obtained by the students in the lab courses and analyze genuine data.  Students really enjoyed the 'field trips' to the lab - for many it was their first time ever in a lab and an eye-opening experience.  Many wanted to arrange to do the actual experiments. Lechner admits the cross-over was challenging for some students to handle the different experiments with blood, and consequently, he revised this part of the course after recognizing the need for more student experience and practice with interpreting experimental data.  

Equally important outcomes for this course were the addition of new insights on blood from students themselves, the TA, and his faculty colleagues.  The connections and contributions just kept growing, and this left Lechner convinced that blood is not just a literal vehicle for nutrients in our bodies, but a vehicle for ideas.  

For more information:  Contact Dr. Mark Lechner (mark_lechner@sfu.ca)