VOLUME XVII, NUMBER 19

#% INNOVATION ABSTRACTS

PUBLISHED BY THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STAFF AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (NISOD), COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, THE

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN * WITH SUPPORT FROM THE W. K. KELLOGG FOUNDATION AND THE SID W. RICHARDSON FOUNDATION

 

Promoting Interdisciplinary Studies

Many institutions of higher learning have created
programs in interdisciplinary studies. Since specializa-
tion traditionally has been the focus of higher educa-
tion, engaging in interdisciplinary studies requires a
difficult shift of consciousness for administrators,
faculty members, and students. Specialization fosters
fragmentation of the modern curriculum; interdiscipli-
nary studies foster integration and synthesis. The
modern tendency to segment areas of knowledge is
increasingly seen as artificial, and it is to the students’
benefit that educators make the effort to integrate their
studies, building on the inherent connections and
overlapping content between disciplines.

Students often complain that required courses do
not relate to one another nor to their lives outside the
academic arena. In response to these complaints,
DeKalb College has created a collegewide committee of
faculty from most divisions and disciplines to promote
interdisciplinary cooperation in the classroom. This
committee has pioneered several innovative techniques
and course offerings to enable students to create more
links between disciplines. On the lowest level the entire
faculty was surveyed and asked to list their areas of
expertise and to indicate if they had interest in team
teaching an interdisciplinary block course (two courses
from different disciplines paired and their content
thematically linked).

The survey generated a database of faculty and
topical areas of expertise under the title Cameos in the
Classroom; it was distributed to all faculty, who were
encouraged to make use of the volunteers as guest
lecturers in their courses. Faculty teaching
Shakespeare’s Richard III in world literature, for
example, could find faculty members specializing in
the Renaissance to lecture on the historical conditions
which led to the Wars of the Roses.

Another list of faculty interested in teaching interdis-
ciplinary block courses was distributed to department
heads and electronically published on the college’s
Freeport system, to which all faculty have access.
Faculty were provided with a vast list of potential
partners for interdisciplinary team teaching and with
ideas for innovative interdisciplinary block courses.

The efforts of the Interdisciplinary Studies Commit-

tee have been very successful. To date, the faculty have
pioneered several interdisciplinary course offerings in a
variety of formats. World civilization courses have been
paired with humanities courses, English composition
with world civilization, American history with political
science, world literature with world civilization,
political science with speech, and American history
with American literature courses, among others.
Faculty are now considering pairing psychology with
statistics, and sociology with psychology; the possibili-
ties seem endless.

Faculty also have experimented with several alterna-
tive ways of structuring these ten-credit block offer-
ings. Courses have been thematically linked by com-
mon assignments, such as term papers, yet taught as
separate units. More extensive linkage has been made
in the English composition and world civilization
block, where composition students were required to
write about topics and readings from the world civili-
zation course.

The world civilization/humanities and world
civilization/world literature block courses have proven
to be particularly successful. In these interdisciplinary
offerings, the paired courses were completely inte-
grated, with one syllabus and one set of writing and
reading assignments. Topics from each course were
matched and team taught as one unit. The two paired
courses met sequentially on either MWF or TTH, and
both instructors were present for the entire meeting
time, providing students with multiple, interdiscipli-
nary perspectives on all topics studied.

Assignments also were made to incorporate interdis-
ciplinary perspectives. For example, in the world
civilization/humanities block, students were asked to
read some Zen historical and religious texts, design a
Zen landscape, and then write an essay explaining this
design. The perspectives of art, architecture, religion,
historical contexts, and composition were united in one
assignment. Students read the Epic of Gilgamesh and
commented on literary aspects which demonstrated
historical realities of antiquity.

Possibilities for linking disciplines are present in the
subject matter of most courses, and students benefit
immensely from these linkages. These initial interdisci-

 

>. THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STAFF AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (NISOD)
| ( J’) Community College Leadership Program, Department of Educational Administration
Sor College of Education, The University of Texas at Austin, SZB 348, Austin, Texas 78712-1293