Cornelius Bennhold Lecture: Can we talk? The challenge of cross-disciplinary STEM instruction and communication

Cross-cultural communication is a hot topic today. The idea of recognizing cultures and the need for understanding implicit cultural assumptions even reaches into the teaching of university science. Cross-disciplinary instruction is common in STEM programs. Physicists teach engineers; chemists teach biologists; and mathematicians teach everybody. But scientific disciplines create distinct cultures – conventions, goals, expectations, and epistemologies –that can lead to serious challenges for an instructor teaching out of her discipline. There are important cultural divides between disciplines and a student's sense of disciplinary identity can create barriers to learning. Teaching a service course, far from being a straightforward and tedious everyday task, is a cross-cultural challenge and figuring out how to do it well can give us dramatic insights both into our sister disciplines and our own.