Structure and Function of Biomacromolecules: A Chemistry/Biochemistry Transdisciplinary Workshop

Higher education in Italy is historically built on monodisciplinary courses with a focus on individual discipline, where students are primarily recipients of information (passive learning). In multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and more so transdisciplinary educational settings, instead, students take an active role in their own learning (active learning), are prompted to find and elaborate connections between apparently distant disciplines, and are offered the opportunity to build cross-sectional knowledge. This is of utmost importance for first-year undergraduate students from scientific schools who deal with sciences such as physics, mathematics, and chemistry, sometimes without a real perspective on what these disciplines are important for. Here, we present and discuss the design of a one-day (7 h) transdisciplinary workshop comprising a series of transdisciplinary and integrated tasks purposedly designed to guide student toward fundamental aspects of biochemistry, building upon the knowledge and competences acquired in a chemistry/organic chemistry course. The workshop was meant to consolidate and increase the student’s awareness of the relevance of chemistry/organic chemistry to understanding biochemistry, and to stimulate curiosity on the connections between the two disciplines. Moreover, being mostly built on teamwork, the workshop also aimed to practice and improve soft skills. Analysis of an anonymous survey taken by the students at completion of the workshop clearly indicated that transdisciplinarity, collaborative learning, and practice of soft skills were perceived as added values of the proposed educational setting.