Attempted Murder: Crows in the Humanities and Sciences, a Novel Interdisciplinary Approach to General Education Curriculum

ABSTRACT

D’Youville University located in Buffalo, NY, has a General Education curriculum that requires students to take 100 level courses from different disciplines that are designed by faculty to create an interdisciplinary experience. In this article, the authors discuss an interdisciplinary course from the Biology and English departments, HUM-189 “Attempted Murder: Crows in the Humanities and Sciences.” The laboratory portion of this course uses animal behavior to engage STEM/Healthcare undergraduates’ students in learning about cognition, behavior, and evolution of corvids. This article focuses on three lab experiments used to engage students in meta-cognition, problem-solving, and frustration. Students are given lab activities and tasks based on real experiments carried out with corvids, students are asked to complete these tasks and assessments, then compare their results with the results of the corvids in question. Students complete journal reflections after each activity. The results from those assessments and student reflections are presented here. Students in HUM-189 “Attempted Murder” learn to appreciate crows as an object of study, as well as lens through which we can think about human relationships with wild animals and with Nature.