College Hour Addresses Interdisciplinary, High-Impact Learning
Dr. Gerald Parker, the associate dean for Global One Health at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (CVM), was joined by staff members from the Texas A&M Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs and Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) on Dec. 7 for a panel discussion on “Emerging Opportunities for Next-Generation, High-Impact Learning.”
The talk, part of the CVM’s College Hour series, included an exploration of the annual Global Pandemic Policy Summit, hosted by the Texas A&M Bush School of Government. Also on the panel were Leslie Ruyle, assistant director for the Scowcroft Institute; Christy Blackburn, Scowcroft Institute assistant research scientist; and Jason Moats, TEEX associate division director for emergency services.
Parker started the talk by saying that among the goals of the summit were to update CVM administrators, faculty, and staff on the event and also to highlight the high-impact learning opportunities their team worked to create via the summit, which was designed to “make the world safe and secure from all sorts of infectious diseases.
“We, alone, at Texas A&M can’t do that, but together, we can all do that,” Parker said. “The CVM has a role with science, with our research. We have a role in educating the next generation. We can jump into this space.
“I think we have a very unique role in our policy; we can implement national and international policy to keep the pressure on Congress on this important area,” he said. “This is an important area that needs resources and money. We need to really have an impact on policy at the national level through this Pandemic Summit and the policy papers that we write.”
To achieve these goals, and, especially, to draw in students, the Pandemic Initiative team developed panel sessions that allowed students to learn about career opportunities, special health topics, and leadership issues, as well as to debate policy strategies and participate in exercises that can inspire them to be more active within the global pandemic arena.
“The absolute best panel that we had of the whole summit was a student panel by five students on what they learned during a session that we had before the summit, on Sunday afternoon,” Parker said.
That special Sunday afternoon session—a simulation—was designed to get more students from interdisciplinary backgrounds involved in the summit; because a multidisciplinary approach is required for addressing pandemics, these students worked with mentors who were experts in a variety of fields, according to Ruyle.
The simulation itself involved an international incident that allowed students to watch and participate in roles that included representatives from international governments and organizations, as well as non-governmental organizations.
“What we landed on was an emerging influenza that was coming out of the coastal region of China. We really hit the students pretty hard. The scenario started in a very densely populated area just north of Shanghai; it ended up in Shanghai and started spreading into southeast Asia, eventually Europe, and then finally hit the United States,” Moats said.
Creating student teams that crossed disciplines worked to “get them out of their comfort zone” while introducing them to the different approaches different disciplines might take in addressing this kind of situation, Moats said.
“It was phenomenal to hear what happens when you break the bonds of what we know; the students really took that to heart, and they started coming up with very novel solutions and these novel thoughts; any one of them we could write a policy paper, coming up with some new solutions for old problems that aren’t easy to fix,” he said.
What also resulted from that, according to Blackburn, is a white paper that a group of participants are now working on based on what they learned about high-impact learning during the simulation.
“They’ve broken it up into four sections being written in tiny, interdisciplinary teams. We have a political scientist, someone from the Bush school, working with someone from the veterinary school; they’re doing preparedness and vaccines,” Blackburn said. “It’s been really nice to see them meet once a month and brief out where they are, what research they’ve developed, how they’ve laid out their section of the white paper.
“Another thing that’s impressive is that they’re all taking their free time outside of their own research and their own classes, for no credit, to do this, because they’re that interested in working in an interdisciplinary fashion,” she said.
The panelists agreed that it’s encouraging to see students who are really interested in having these opportunities, and the team is working to incorporate more of these high-impact learning opportunities into classes and other activities like the pandemic summit.
“One of the huge longer-terms benefits these activities is that we can encourage students to be interested in career fields related to pandemics, to gain communication skills, and think about how we have to integrate science and policy and lead from a solid scientist foundation,” Parker said.
