Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning
by
Susan B. Apel

Learning the law can be a narrowing experience. While many of us exhort our students to bring various experiences and other kinds of knowledge to their legal education, that exhortation stands to one side, rather than forming the core of our pedagogy. Nowhere is this more evident than in our curriculum. Law schools offer the occasional interdisciplinary course in, for example, psychology and the law, or law and economics, but most of our curricular offerings are the standard law-only courses.

Three years ago, my own cumulative experience in teaching family law led me finally to say out loud what I had long suspected. It is difficult, if not impossible, to train students to be good family law lawyers without some instruction in child development, or rudimentary commercial practices such as mortgages and insurance. We tend to think that somehow, somewhere, students have learned these things, maybe in undergraduate courses or in life. Often they haven't. This lack of knowledge and its negative effects were evident as I watched my students trying to negotiate settlements in a simulated divorce.

My observations led, in circuitous fashion, to my putting together an interdisciplinary seminar titled "Medical-Legal Issues and Our Changing Concepts of Reproduction and the Family." The course has now been taught twice by myself and my new colleague, Dr. Judy E. Stern of the Dartmouth Medical School. The class is composed of both law and medical students. The readings are from medical and law journals, empirical biological and psychological studies, and popular media. We discuss issues such as egg and sperm donation, the cryopreservation of human embryos, cloning, and genetic diagnosis.

The seminar has been a hit, loved by students (both kinds) and, perhaps not altogether impartially, adjudged by its professors to possess great pedagogical vitality. And so, the logical direction of this article would be to further explain the considerable benefits of such a course to the students who learn from it. While that article is in the near future, the point of this article is to discuss something more unexpected, and that is the benefits of teaching such an interdisciplinary course. The benefits have been too numerous to recount; what follows are but some of them.

Even for an experienced teacher (and this is thought by some to be the unnerving part), teaching in an interdisciplinary setting is a new experience. Aside from content, the teaching methodology changes. Not only does one share the podium, one becomes aware that teachers in different disciplines may teach differently to students who are accustomed to learning differently. For example, extensive reading, I have learned, is more reflective of demands placed upon law rather than medical students. My colleague is an adept lecturer and uses visual technology such as slides and charts. Ever the law professor, I tend to ask open-ended questions. This naturally leads not only to a mix of teaching activities in each class but, more important, has allowed me a regular and close-up look at an effective professor who employs methods different from my own.

Second, apart from the process of teaching, one gets to learn something new; for me, medical science was heretofore unknown, and unknowable. The learning curve is dizzyingly exciting. As the professor, one gets to integrate new information into one's own understanding of the subject matter, and the results are profoundly satisfying. Not only does one learn for learning's sake (never underestimate the power of that), but that integration of knowledge reflects the students' own experience. The professor, therefore, gets to occupy two places at the seminar table -- that of teacher and student. What better way to learn and teach than to do them simultaneously?

Finally, it is rejuvenating to venture outside the legal academic world. Especially because I teach at a free-standing law school without benefit of a larger university community, the participation in another setting -- a medical school -- brings contact with different students, different colleagues, even a different physical environment. Symbolic of and testament to the otherworldliness of this experience is the human skeleton that hangs outside my seminar classroom at the medical school. Perhaps over time it will become as so much wallpaper, but for now, it reminds me each time that I have left the comforts of my professional home behind. It remains a little spooky, but I have the thrill of exploring new space.