Setting Up an Undergraduate Immunology Lab: Resources and Examples

Active Learning and Technology Approaches for Teaching Immunology to Undergraduate Students

Immunology is a fascinating and extremely complex field, with natural connections to many disciplines both within STEM and beyond. Teaching an undergraduate course in immunology therefore provides both opportunities and challenges. Significant challenges to student learning include mastering the volume of new vocabulary and figuring out how to think coherently about a physiological system that is so anatomically disseminated. More importantly, teaching immunology can be complicated because it requires students to integrate knowledge derived from prior introductory courses in a range of fields, including cell biology, biochemistry, anatomy and genetics. However, this also provides an opportunity to use the study of the immune system as a platform on which students can assemble and integrate foundational STEM knowledge, while also learning about a new and exciting field. Pedagogical theory has taught us that students learn best by engaging with complicated questions and by thinking metacognitively about how to approach solutions. Building this skill set in today's students, who now hail from a broad demographic and who are accustomed to acquiring their knowledge from a variety of different media, requires a new set of teaching tools. Using perspectives from four different immunology educators, we describe a range of student-centered, active learning approaches that have been field-tested in a number of different immunology classrooms and that are geared to a variety of learning styles. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that active learning approaches to immunology improve comprehension and retention by increasing student engagement in class and their subsequent mastery of complex topics.

Targeting the Achievement Gap: Strategies Toward Removing Inequities in Undergraduate Immunology Education

A diverse student body enriches the classroom with lived experiences, varied skillsets, community and cultural knowledge, resiliency, and altruistic interests, all critical attributes that benefit both the classroom and the STEM field at large. However, a persistent disparity in academic and educational attainment exists between under-represented minority (URM) and non-URM students in STEM fields. This achievement gap discourages talented URM students from entering STEM professions, threatening the potential, expertise, and perspective of these professions. Here we describe the factors that contribute to the achievement gap and present strategies, utilized in our Immunology classrooms, for combating each factor. We discuss project-based learning pedagogy to give students increased agency and feelings of empowerment. We also highlight concrete practices to foster students' science identities and sense of community, factors that highly promote STEM retention. The dynamic subject of Immunology provides myriad opportunities to implement a curriculum committed to equity, as we outline below.