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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- five 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-

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Community College Leadership Program, Department of Educational Administration College of Education, The University of Texas at Austin, SZB 348, Austin, Texas 78712-1293