Insects shaping society: using an interactive and multidisciplinary teaching approach to engage students deeply

Abstract

Insects can be harnessed for food, medicine, and construction material, they can inspire architecture and design. They have prominent roles in myth and songs, and they have shaped language. Artists challenge our emotional and aesthetic connection to insects through the creation of films, performance art, music, and the visual arts. Insects are both biologically and socially complex, and thus provide important parallels to human biology and societal organisation. And yet, the environmental impact of the human-centric Anthropocene has led to enormous insect declines.

Despite the clear importance of insects within human society, entomology is an underrepresented field in Australian Universities more broadly. By offering Insects Shaping Society as an undergraduate breadth subject, we aim to increase excitement and engagement with insects. The subject invites students from a range of disciplines to interact with and explore the impacts that insects have on humans and on human society. Students learn from experts across many different fields in the sciences and humanities through a combination of lectures and interactive activities. The subject aims to broaden the students’ view of the multifaceted impacts that insects have on human society.

The curriculum for Insects Shaping Society is organised around weekly case studies, delivered via pre-recorded materials and participatory seminars. The pre-recorded material allows the students to engage asynchronously with an array of information types, including traditional lectures given by an academic, interviews with external academic and industry experts, and clips from the media. The weekly seminars allow students to sustain close analysis on an insect case study through independent research, class discussion, debate, and interactive exercises. This rhizomatic learning framework allows the learners to build skills communication, knowledge literacy and argument formation—the key intended outcomes in this subject— and to increase their digital literacy via online instruction, the flipped classroom model, and independent research tasks.

Our curriculum approach uses a multidisciplinary lens; we organise the subject by topic, rather than field. As such, HASS and STEM topics are woven together and intermixed, rather than blocked together. There are clear themes that run through the subject, such as: a) the feeling of disgust that insects can provoke, captured in horror film and forms a major barrier to insects being used in human food, b) the ethical considerations surrounding the use of insects in performance art, food production and architectural design, c) the differences in cultural perceptions of insects across the Western sciences to Indigenous Australian knowledges, foods, myths, and rituals. This subject is about insects, but it also about how humans interact with insects and is therefore inherently interdisciplinary. We reflect this curriculum design in our teaching strategy, where each week, there are STEM and HASS topics are given equal weight. Our use of novel teaching techniques in tertiary education garners student interest in studying, researching, and making art about insect, thus breaking down barriers to protecting insects within our local and global environments. ideas for a structured abstract on empirical studies