An interdisciplinary, co-teaching approach to a course in urban social-ecological systems

Integrating the social sciences into an undergraduate urban ecology course helps students gain interdisciplinary knowledge and skills to address critical sustainability challenges. We therefore designed a co-taught social-ecological systems course that combines different disciplines to engage students in our main goals of fostering personal connections with cities, integrating humans into the ecology “in” and “of” cities, exploring environmental injustice with multiple perspectives, and representing social-ecological systems for communication and decision-making. Here we describe our context and content for specific teaching activities, and reflections on the experiences of co-teaching this course. Integrating ecological and social sciences provides broad, diverse perspectives on urban systems and emphasizes the interconnections and feedbacks between humans and the urban environment. This allows us to teach students complex problem solving by synthesizing information across different perspectives and using real-world situations while deepening their understanding of the relationships between ecological, social, political, and economic systems.