2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Templeton Institute at Union College “catalyzes learning through a dynamic environment that fosters collaboration within and across engineering, computer science, and traditional liberal arts disciplines. Its mission is to enable connections, experimentation, innovation, and discovery through integrative coursework, projects, and research” (“Mission and Goals”). One mechanism used to complete this mission is the creation of multidisciplinary courses that blend Engineering, Computer Science, and the Liberal Arts. The Templeton Institute recognizes that time and resources can be barriers to designing new collaborative, multidisciplinary courses. To decrease the impact of these barriers, the Templeton Institute provides a number of one-time incentives for new course development, which provide critical support during the design and implementation phase of launching new courses.

In the 2024-2025 academic year, the Templeton Institute selected three team-taught courses through a competitive application process. The first course, AMU/ECE-246 “What Does Data Sound Like?” is a collaboration between faculty members in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Music. This course introduces students to the field of data sonification, where they learn to translate data into sound, explore its interdisciplinary applications in fields such as Healthcare, Engineering, and the Arts, and gain hands-on experience with tools and techniques for both scientific and creative projects. The second course is a collaboration between Spanish and Hispanic Studies, German Studies, and Civil and Environmental Engineering, ESC/ISC-221 “Humanity-Centered Design: Ecodesign Your Life.” This Fall 2024 course focuses on offering a humanity-centered course which will enable students to broaden their understanding of ‘design’ from multiple disciplines and diverse perspectives with a focus on our lives, experiences, and stories of people, communities, and ecosystems. The third course offered through the Templeton Institute is STS-101 “Introduction to Science, Technology, and Society.” This introduces students to the range of methodologies, epistemologies, topics, and concerns central to the field of STS, including how scientific and technological concepts develop, take root, and evolve; the role of scientists and engineers as technologies interact and intersect with broader societies; and the ethical responsibilities associated with the development of technology. These and other fundamental questions are explored in this introductory survey course, team-taught by four of Union College’s faculty members from English, History, Classics, and Computer Science, with a guest lecturer from Engineering.

This demonstrated team-taught, multidisciplinary approach taken by all of these Templeton Institute courses has had a number of immediate benefits to faculty and students both inside and outside of the classroom: (1) an increased mixing of Engineering, Computer Science, and Humanities disciplines; (2) the development of unique multidisciplinary undergraduate research projects; and (3) a number of collaborative grant proposals for more intentionally integrated and harmonious curricular planning. This paper (if selected) will introduce these three courses in more detail, outline benefits and challenges of this Union College and Templeton Institute model, provide first-hand faculty and student perspectives from the courses, and include a discussion of the benefits of providing differing, complementary, or contrasting perspectives on current issues through the lenses of various disciplines.