Interdisciplinarity
Silver Experience
GWST 352: Women, Gender, and Information Technology
In the spring of 2020, I took the Gender Women Studies: Women, Gender, and Information Technology course. This class focused on the important issues faced by women and other underrepresented minorities in the technology fields. In the course, we covered topics including the impact of technology on women, the impact women have on technology, and the contributions made to the technology fields by women. This class was a great opportunity to hear and discuss the opinions of students from various majors, not just STEM majors, which provided fresh insight to the topics. The integration of insights from across disciplines can help create a more comprehensive perspective to approach these issues with.
In the class, interdisciplinarity was approached in different ways. The first way was through contextualization, which for this class involved different histories used to understand the topics covered in a better way. The second way was through problem centering, which is used because the class is based on discussing issues in the STEM fields having to do with women and underrepresented minorities. The last way is the broad model that focuses on all disciplines and helps reveal how complex the issues that are being faced truly are. It helps provide a common ground on the basis of shared concepts.
Reflection
In this class, I definitely improved my perspectivism, which is to fairly consider perspectives and ideas besides their own and using these perspectives to inform their actions and views. This class deals with different ethical concepts faced by different groups, and within the classroom there was conversation to find common ground in those experiences. It allowed for a space where debate and understanding were practiced to help challenge and sometimes change the perspectives of others based on one's own experience. My experience in the class will allow me to take my newly formed outlook and apply it in decisions I make moving forward. This class also allowed me to identify the different disciplines that contribute to the solution of a complex problem because this class brings together a variety of students from across majors. These students work together to discovering and solving issues faced by women and underrepresented minorities in STEM.
This experience will help me with my grand challenge of engineering the tools of scientific discovery because it provided me with understand the backgrounds and experiences of different majors in regards to the STEM fields. I was given some new perspectives and they can help me continue to work on my grand challenge with a regard for dealing with particular issues related to it.