VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY
Abstract
Interdisciplinary teaching in higher education faces multiple challenges. Disciplinary silos limit the exchange of ideas across fields, students struggle to communicate using different specialized vocabularies and sensitivities, and faculty must navigate different teaching traditions. These barriers become particularly evident when bridging disciplines like architecture with biology. This paper shares the experience of a pilot course at Los Andes University in Bogotá, Colombia, that brought together 20 architecture students and 21 biology students with one professor from each discipline. The eight-week course tasked combined groups to develop guidelines for a botanical garden in Honda, Colombia, a region characterized by dry-tropical and humid tropical forest ecosystems. Students contributed from their own areas of expertise to create a comprehensive design proposal. Although integration between groups started slower than expected, several pedagogical activities proved effective in fostering collaboration. Pair-share exercises helped students learn each other’s disciplinary languages and approaches. Joint field trips provided hands-on experiences that enriched understanding of both architectural and biological considerations for the site. Progressive assignments built toward a final group project where students synthesized their proposals through collaborative presentations. This paper examines what worked, what proved challenging, and what needs improvement to facilitate similar courses between different departments. Results demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary teaching and its positive impact on student engagement. The paper also explores how international collaboration with a visiting professor could enrich these flexible and non-traditional teaching settings, offering practical strategies for institutions seeking to break down disciplinary barriers.
Carolina Blanco is an architect from the National University of Colombia, with a master’s degree in engineering and a Ph.D. in Architecture and Structural Design from Hokkaido University (Japan). She is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Design at los Andes University, where she joined the Habitat and Public Pedagogies Research Group, teaching courses related to urban systems and multi-scale analysis, public space, housing, gender and peace studies. Her research interest focuses on the relationship between architecture, water, environment, and learning community.
Felipe Zapata – B.Sc. in Biology (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia), Ph.D. Biology, University of Missouri-St. Louis & Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis MO, USA; Postdoc, Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley, Berkeley CA, USA and Postdoc, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University, Providence RI, USA. Felipe is Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, affiliate faculty in the Institute of Environment and Sustainability, and co-director of the Center for Tropical Research at UCLA. He has more than 20 years of experience working in the American tropics investigating what biological processes explain how plant diversity is generated and maintained in natural populations. To do this, his research team combines field explorations, genomics, physiology, and computational biology to address questions related to the ecology, evolution, and conservation of tropical plant diversity.
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Friday 26th June, 2026