Many societal opportunities and challenges, both current and future, are
either inter- or transdisciplinary in nature. Focus and action to cut
across traditional academic boundaries has increased in research and, to
a less extent, teaching. One successful collaboration has been the
augmentation of fields within the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts
by integrating complementary tools and methods originated from STEM.
This trend is gradually materializing in formal undergraduate and
secondary education.
The proven effectiveness of Jupyter notebooks for teaching and learning
STEM practices gives rise to a nascent case for education seeking to
replicate this interdisciplinary design to adopt notebook technology as
the best pedagogical tool for this job. This article presents two sets
of data to help argue this case.
The first set of data demonstrates the art of the possible. A sample of
undergraduate and secondary level courses showcases existing or recent
work of educational stakeholders in the US and UK who are already
pioneering instruction where computational and data practices are
integrated into the study of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts,
with Jupyter notebooks chosen as a central pedagogical tool.
Supplementary data providing an overview of the types of technical
material covered by each course syllabi further evidences what
interdisciplinary education is perceived to be or is already feasible
using this Jupyter technology with student audiences of these levels.
The second set of data provides more granular, concrete insight derived
from user experiences of a handful of the courses from the sample. Four
instructors and one student describe a range of pedagogical benefits and
value they attribute to the use of Jupyter notebooks in their course(s).
In presenting this nascent case, the article aims to stimulate the
development of Jupyter notebook-enabled, computational data-driven
interdisciplinary education within undergraduate and secondary school
programs.
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