Dr. Nina Powell (pictured, top left) from the NUS Department of Psychology is part of a team of educators designing and teaching the new integrated module in Social Sciences, HSS1000 Understanding Social Complexity, for the College of Humanities and Sciences (CHS).

Led by Associate Provost of Undergraduate Education, A/P Daniel Goh (pictured, bottom left), the module planning team includes faculty members from the departments of Economics, Geography, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology.

As part of the interdisciplinary education that CHS offers, students will read 13 modules in the CHS core curriculum, of which HSS1000 Understanding Social Complexity is one of the three integrated modules from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), alongside HSA1000 Asian Interconnections and HSH1000 The Human Condition:

HSS1000 Understanding Social Complexity
This foundation module introduces interdisciplinary work in contemporary social science and encourages thinking about social complexity. We will examine how social scientists construct causal theories, collect and interpret evidence, and use findings to inform knowledge and practice. We will consider pertinent issues affecting contemporary societies, especially those current in Singapore society. Through comparisons of Singapore with other cases in Asia and beyond, students will gain the ability to analyse critically the context-dependent nature of human behaviour and social change. The module will help students grapple with difficult social questions of our times and see possibilities for the future of society.

HSS1000 will comprise two lecture series on the themes of “development” and “freedom”, respectively. Dr. Powell will be headlining the “freedom” lecture series with an interactive lecture format that involves interdisciplinary conversations, with Dr. Georgios Georgiou (Department of Economics) and A/P Daniel Goh (Department of Sociology) taking part in her lectures on the social construction of freedom and the moral psychology of crime and deviance. In the module’s final lecture, Dr. Powell will also be chairing the panel of five lecturers to discuss the future and the contribution of social science to the critical issues affecting humanity.

A/P Daniel Goh commented,

With HSS1000, we are zooming in on interdisciplinary education. There are many layered meanings here. Technically we are enabled by the Zoom webinar technology to teach close to 1,200 students in the coming semester … More importantly, the technology allows us to be flexible in configuring the interdisciplinary connections and conversations we want to present to students. We will teach interdisciplinary connections, which we from diverse disciplines have been discovering in this journey of designing this module… We are experiencing interdisciplinary education ourselves. And we will become more so in the course of lecturing, which is why we will also stage interdisciplinary conversations to teach ourselves further and draw in our students to learn by seeing their professors discussing and debating with each other.”

Read more: https://medium.com/@danielpsgoh/zooming-in-on-interdisciplinary-education-9833a5a3961a

Photo credit: HSS1000 Lecture 1, A/P Daniel Goh