Constructing the Immune Panorama: a jigsaw-style, artifact-centered approach to teaching immunology.

Abstract

Immunology is a conceptually challenging subject due to its multi-level organization and dynamic, non-linear processes. Medical students often struggle to integrate molecular mechanisms, cellular interactions, and system-level responses into a coherent understanding. While collaborative learning can enhance engagement, approaches that explicitly support multi-scale mechanistic reasoning and systems thinking in immunology education remain underexplored. We conducted a qualitative curriculum case study of a scaffolded, jigsaw-style, artifact-centered capstone activity embedded within a required undergraduate medical immunology course (N = 27). Five student groups were assigned complementary conceptual dimensions representing spatial, molecular, cellular, temporal, and regulatory aspects of immune function. Guided by a shared "Immune Kingdom" metaphor, students developed multimodal artifacts that were iteratively refined through instructor feedback and synthesized into the Immune Panorama. Evidence was drawn from student-generated artifacts, instructor assessment, and a post-course questionnaire. Student-generated artifacts demonstrated complementary representations of immune organization across spatial, molecular, cellular, temporal, and regulatory dimensions. Instructor-guided refinement helped students correct conceptual ambiguities and strengthen mechanistic connections within their artifacts. In the post-course questionnaire, students reported that the activity supported system-level understanding, mechanistic learning, visualization of complex immune processes, and collaborative learning. Collectively, the five group artifacts were synthesized into the Immune Panorama, a shared conceptual framework representing immune function across multiple biological scales. This curriculum demonstrates that a jigsaw-style, artifact-centered learning design can support the development of integrated, multi-scale understanding in undergraduate immunology. Through collaborative construction of the Immune Panorama, students engaged in systems thinking and multi-scale mechanistic reasoning. The framework provides a practical curricular model that may be adapted to other biomedical and life science disciplines requiring integration of complex biological systems.