By Eddie Lo
On the first day of class, one of the instructors told the class she had no idea how this course would progress. I wasn’t exactly sure how to interpret that. The class was held at the Art Department’s two-story atrium, itself not a traditional classroom setting, and there were no textbooks for me to frame what we would learn in this class.
Moreover, five instructors were standing in front of the classroom.
The class was “Memory: An Interdisciplinary Exploration,” and it was created under UC Santa Barbara’s Division of Humanities and Fine Arts through the Arnhold Innovative Teaching and Learning Initiative (AITLI). The class concerned “migration and human cognition, including the influence of cultural memory,” according to the syllabus.
I expected the class to introduce these topics through the disciplines of the three co-instructors: neuroscience professor Kenneth Kosik, Galician bagpiper Christina Pato from Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble, and art professor Kim Yasuda. We also had two teaching assistants, Tejas Aralere from the Classics Department and Maiza Hixson from the Art Department.
But it turned out the scope of the class was way beyond what I had imagined.
Students created their own “Memory Boxes,” which were exhibited at UC Santa Barbara’s Glass Box Gallery at the end of the course.
Photo by Eddie Lo
The official topic for the course was memory and migration, but the class spanned anything and everything that connects to it. Throughout the course, more than a dozen guest faculty members contributed to the class, connecting their disciplines, such as geography and anthropology, to what we were studying. They introduced us to the latest research in their fields and their ongoing projects, like the Brain Initiative, West is South, and Human Mind & Migration.
The diversity did not stop at the faculty level — the 37 students in the class spoke 16 languages and studied 23 different disciplines. Up to that point, I had encountered more or less the same STEM-oriented perspectives in my classes during my time at UC Santa Barbara. It was really eye-opening for me to see class discussions approached with expertise from all fields. I believe it was eye-opening for the instructors too. They also asked questions that they didn’t know the answer to, and learned from students.
There were no assignments or exams to make sure we “learned” the material. The instructors designed the course to leave learning on our own, and the class revealed that freedom can grip students harder when it comes to exploratory learning. There were two mandatory projects for the entire class, the first a “Memory Box” that “maps and visualizes our individual and cultural memories and migration.” Students created the box from scratch, including cutting and piecing together scrap wood from the Art Department woodshop, and curated the piece by filling the box with objects of our choice.
The second project was a collaborative group project in which students had to approach a key topic in class in an interdisciplinary manner. My groupmates and I decided to investigate whether memory, characterized by electrochemical impulses, can be conceived of as a physical entity anchored in the brain.
We created a web-based project, and, armed with an arsenal from the Art Department and encouraged by the ever-enthusiastic professor Yasuda, we created physical representations of key parts of the brain, including a 3D-printed cerebellum. The class’s Memory Boxes and final projects were then exhibited at the Glass Box Gallery with an open house at the end of the session, when we presented our projects to HFA Dean John Majewski and Associate Dean Mary Hancock.
The class was unconventional and very experimental from the start. It was structured, but allowed any variance to take place and sometimes even take over. When the instructor told us on the first day that she didn’t know how the class would progress, it was as if she handed each of us a sprouted seed to nurture and see what would happen. By the last day of class, it was revealed that the plant had mutated at every branch and produced a tree with flowers of all kinds of shapes and every conceivable color.
Looking back, I recall that every node along the way was a delightful surprise, nurtured by the creativity of faculty and students, with the final products of the class built by everyone along the way. The interdisciplinary approach is still rare in most classroom settings at UCSB, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It has the potential to create unexpected inspiration for classes, and I believe it can make learning more rewarding and fun.
Eddie Lo is a second-year psychological & brain sciences major at UC Santa Barbara. He wrote this article for his Writing Program course, Journalism for Web and Social Media.