# Teaching system-level thinking with an interdisciplinary lens ![Fawwaz Habbal](/sites/g/files/omnuum12666/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/vpl/files/habbal_240_bw.jpg?itok=m5TY0IRD) ![Doris Sommer](/sites/g/files/omnuum12666/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/vpl/files/sommer_240_bw.jpg?itok=SVbjc0Yh) **Fawwaz Habbal, Executive Dean for Education and Research and Senior Lecturer on Applied Physics**, and **Doris Sommer, Ira Jewell Williams, Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies**, co-teach systems-level thinking. Their course, *Aesthetic Pleasure and Smart Design: Janus Faces the Future*, trains students to look at complex problems from the perspective of both artists and engineers. This requires the development of skills in scientific assessment and disinterested aesthetic judgment. In the spirit of [*Renaissance Now*](https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:1853b385-2431-45b9-84d4-19c4aa783989), an international movement to promote sustainable development, Habbal and Sommer model the combination of boldness and humility. Students in ES 27 read and reflect on material which ranges from aesthetic philosophy and history to triggers for scientific revolution. Then they tackle a complex problem through a proposal that will gain aesthetic acceptance and be scientifically effective. ## The benefits Students develop a critical skill for design: the skill of judgment. “Technology has advanced to the point where we can make anything,” Habbal points out. “We should ask what and why.” Here, students think at the systems-level and reflect on their place within that complex system. “It’s essential,” Habbal notes, “to think beyond the surface and explore root causes that link one challenge to many others.” > ***“Everything around us is interdisciplinary. Nothing in nature is one discipline.”*** ## The challenges “Since systems pose open-ended problems, we can examine and use several lenses to determine elements, feedback loops, and dynamics. But our partial understanding cannot generate a single answer.” To train students to lean into uncertainty, Habbal and Sommer do not drive the classroom but instead participate as role models—honoring everyone’s unique expertise and questions and encouraging improvisation. Sommer describes the spirit of participants as “fearless but humble.” ## Takeaways and best practice ### Co-design your co-teaching. Collaborating on course design is vital to teaching a truly interdisciplinary course. “Professors at Harvard are all experts at something - maybe more than one thing,” Sommer reflects, “but a truly interdisciplinary course requires one to defer to another’s expertise.” This is different from switching leadership of classroom and critical to facilitators who model how to acknowledge the limits of one’s knowledge and the joy of new understandings. They depend on each other’s expertise and explore the connections between engineering concepts and humanistic interpretation. ### Enable students to practice synthesis in conversation with each other. Habbal and Sommer achieve full participation through “chain conversation” in which students invite each other to contribute after speaking. “If they go on tangents, we allow the flow and encourage them to reconnect with the readings.” This ensures that everyone synthesizes the range of materials and contributes from their expertise. “The course is not ‘downloading,’” Habbal smiles. “It sets off chains that continue beyond our sessions.” ### Embrace opportunities to practice synthesis through assignments. “Projects are the ideal platform to understand that innovation requires practice, and that discovery and success are not obtained through a linear process.” As a result, Habbal and Sommer assign a project as the final assessment for the course. Students work together to understand what exists and imagine what is possible, while also building connections with their peers. Through collaborating within a real-world context and working within the “heterogeneity” of interdisciplinarity, students can better experience “a true paradigm shift.” Examples of student proposals included: a vegetable garden irrigated by trapping humidity on the rainless hills of Lima, Peru; a museum pedagogy that uses moveable galleries to equitably engages broad publics; landscaping to recover a waterlogged coastal area. ### Bottom line Sommer and Habbal emphasize diversity in the teaching team’s expertise. Sommer favors a small teaching team that allows for active synergies and frank interchanges inside and outside the classroom. While Habbal notes that even the multiple of two offers a plethora of information that leads beyond one’s own discipline, “the bottom line is *how* we discuss it and *how* we relate it to our lived context.” ## Related research [### Involving foreign-language speaking simulated patients in medical interpreter training: A qualitative study ](https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1mdq5o5/TN_cdi_doaj_primary_oai_doaj_org_article_2bf42c1f07c643138b454d9f660365cf) This paper reports on an interdisciplinary training initiative involving student interpreters and medical students. It provides qualitative evidence on how the stakeholders involved perceive the effects of including foreign-language speaking simulated... [### Medicine in Mandarin: Introducing Native Language Training in a Medical School Curriculum ](https://mededpublish.org/articles/8-205) In 2014, Medicine in Mandarin was established by the University of Michigan Medical School (UMMS) as a pre-clinical elective taught by a nationally certified healthcare Mandarin interpreter. A 32-hour curriculum was developed, including both didactics and... [### Professional language use by alumni of the Harvard Medical School Medical Language Program ](https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-020-02323-x) Despite the growing number of patients with limited English proficiency in the United States, not all medical schools offer medical language courses to train future physicians in practicing language-concordant care. Little is known about the long-term use... [ More Research arrow\_circle\_right ](/intopracticeresearch) ## Related resource [### Dr. Manuel Guillermo Herrera Acena: Changing the Face of Health Care for Latinos/as ](https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/dr-manuel-guillermo-herrera-acena/) Herrera Acena, a long time professor in the Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), runs The Spanish Clinic of Brigham and Women’s out of the ambulatory building of the Harvard teaching hospital. In the late 1960s... [### DISCIPLINARY TRANSPARENCY ](https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/disciplinary-transparency) The Derek Bok Center for Teaching & Learning offers advice on how to be clear about the disciplinary goals and conventions operating within your course. [### Harvard Library's Databases page ](https://databases.hollis.harvard.edu/primo-explore/search?vid=HVD_DB&lang=en_US) To explore a topic through the lens of different disciplines, pay a visit to the Library's Databases page, which harnesses HOLLIS search algorithms to connect you with thousands of e-resources, sorted by topic. Be sure to explore the "Best databases for"... [ More Resources arrow\_circle\_right ](/intopracticeresources) See also:- [ FAS ](/featured-faculty/fas) - [ SEAS ](/featured-faculty/seas) - [ Into Practice Issues ](/practice-categories/practice-issues) - [ Interdisciplinary ](/topics/interdisciplinary)