Elwood Murray's interdisciplinary analogue laboratory

Elwood Murray's Interdisciplinary Analogue Laboratory, first offered on the University of Denver campus in 1965, was conceived to alleviate what Murray saw as some of the most crucial problems of general education. The college curriculum, he believed, encouraged students to see their subjects of study as separated along unnatural departmental lines. Students were neither taught to apply what they had learned nor were they helped to see the relationships between knowledge from different fields. The Analogue Laboratory provided an opportunity for increased communication between scholars from different disciplines. The task of laboratory groups was to identify analogous structures occurring in different fields. These “basic structures” could then serve as a foundation around which to build an integrated curriculum where students would be encouraged to view their subjects of study relationally.