Multidisciplinary

At some level, all courses offered at Choate are multidisciplinary. The following courses were specifically designed with a multidisciplinary approach at their core and, as such, add value to the learning process by helping students to understand that real problem-solving involves multiple competencies.
DERON N. CHANG, Director of Curricular Initiatives

Sample Courses

Seminar in Art History

This seminar considers the architecture of Choate Rosemary Hall and its historical antecedents from Italy, England, and America. Considerable study is devoted to Ralph Adams Cram’s Seymour St. John Chapel and Archbold Hall, I.M. Pei’s Paul Mellon Arts Center, Pelli Clarke Pelli’s Lanphier Center, Bowie Gridley’s St. John Hall, and Robert A.M. Stern’s Colony Hall. Students acquire an understanding of the principles of these buildings, their place in the history of architecture, and their impact on teaching and learning at our school.

Start-Up Design Lab and Innovation Studio

This course is a hands-on introduction to being a 21st century maker-scholar-inventor that meets students where they are. It is a makers’ workshop, a design lab, and a creative-programming studio, intended to provide a supporting framework for students’ research and development as they build innovative projects of their own design. This class focuses on storytelling and narrating what we do, documenting projects and generating a shared dialogue of what is observed and learned along the way.

Cognitive Neuroscience

One of the fastest growing research areas in science is neuroscience. Cognitive and behavioral studies have attracted considerable popular and scientific attention in recent years and new techniques have opened up novel avenues for exploration. This course provides an introduction to the cellular and molecular mechanisms of neuronal function, and examines how cognitive processes can be explained by the structure and function of the brain.

Climate Change: From Knowledge to Action

Climate change is a defining global problem of the 21^st century, touching all aspects of human and nonhuman life. In this course, we grapple with the challenges posed by climate change by exploring its social dimensions. While we begin with a basic overview of climate science, the bulk of the course draws on ideas, approaches, and sources from many humanities and social science disciplines, the arts, and English. In so doing, we discover new ways to think and talk about climate change.

Islamic Civilizations of the Middle East

Starting with the rise of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and concluding with the fall of the Ottoman empire at the end of World War I, students read a college-level text, study primary sources, and explore visual materials, to discover the history of Islamic thought and socio-political institutions as well as Islam’s many forms of art, literature, and architecture. The course culminates in a student project on the art and architecture of a particular Islamic dynasty or city.

MultidisciplinaryCourse Descriptions