ABSTRACT
Students enrolled in developmental and introductory writing courses typically have difficulty identifying connections between what they encounter in these and their other courses, let alone their future careers; this disconnect is augmented by higher education’s spotlight on STEM, risking those connections become more obscure unless composition instructors find meaningful ways to embrace STEM, especially at community colleges, where STEM education and career training are often combined. This chapter argues that inquiry-based learning, which “[…] promotes the acquisition of new knowledge […] through students’ increasingly independent investigation of […] issues,” is at the center of both science and humanities coursework, and the learning strategies used in both disciplines often overlap more than many students and faculty realize. Through examinations of content-development, building student schema, and curriculum design, as well as firsthand examples of our assignments, we will provide faculty with methods to teach classes that are interdisciplinary and address the needs of the diverse student writers entering both developmental and introductory writing courses at the community college.
