It has been quite the journey, and compared to when I first added my neuroscience minor during my sophomore year, I am in a very different place, after having actually taken neurochemistry. I had realized I would have to enroll in the class without having completed the prerequisite and I was very concerned. Concerned that I would not be able to understand the material.
To a certain extent, this was true.
BUT, this was a good thing, and I have grown so much! First of all, the set up of class was very different from what I was used to. I expected to be taught so much neurochemistry that I would struggle to understand and memorize, but instead, we all brought our individual knowledge, research and personal experiences to the table and learned from each other, students and professor alike. We read a different article each week, tried to understand the topic as best we could, and sometimes we all couldn’t quite wrap our heads around how things worked (oftentimes because more research was necessary). To address some of our unanswered questions we each researched a related topic for our “speed dates” on Wednesdays and then ended the week with open ended discussions every Friday. These were the days we made the most connections with other areas of study. The paper on obesity connected to my Body Politics class, the paper on neural signaling in schizophrenia connected to Abnormal Psychology, the endocannabinoid paper was closely intertwined with politics and societal issues in our discussions, and the list goes on. This integrated learning was the true goal of the class, and I quickly realized that the neurochemical details of a disease or disorder were important, but we could all still learn and integrate different areas of study without them, while critically thinking about real world applications.
Of course, we did have to memorize one or the other signaling pathway for our exams, but even the exams were nothing I had encountered before. In the written part, we had to hypothesize how a possible signaling pathway might work and contribute to a certain disease. Whether our hypothesized pathway was right or wrong did not matter as long as we had thought critically about the information and could back up our ideas with some of the facts we were given. After then reading the whole research article, which the facts were selected from, we would have an oral exam to discuss our hypotheses and determine ways in which we were correct or false.
Overall, the neurochemistry we discussed in the classroom really grew my critical thinking abilities and demonstrated that it is alright (and sometimes simply not possible) to not know all of the information, but that we nevertheless have to ask questions, be open minded, investigate what we don’t know and think critically to try our best.
However, the class did not end there. For the PEAK or Capstone aspect, we directly integrated neurochemistry with different areas of study for real life applications, just as we were discussing in the classroom. We partnered with students majoring in social work and completed different projects in our Fargo-Moorhead community. One of the things this allowed me to do, is make direct connections between not only Neurochemistry and Social Work, but also integrate both of my majors of Psychology and Spanish. We did so by partnering with a Hispanic church, where we presented information about Alzheimer’s disease in both English and Spanish and provided some potential care options and financial resources for anyone who may at some point encounter the disease in their lives, whether that is personally or through someone they know.
When considering all the different aspects of this course, it easily fulfilled Concordia’s five goals for liberal learning…
- Instill a love for learning
- Develop foundational skills and transferable intellectual capacities
- Develop an understanding of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives and their connections
- Cultivate an examined cultural, ethical, physical and spiritual self-understanding
- Encourage responsible participation in the world
… and demonstrated to me again the significant impact a liberal arts education can have.
