Interdisciplinarity & Collaboration
Brigid O'Donnell
Summer 2019
Over the past three months, I have come to a richer understanding of the core tenets of cluster pedagogy/learning. Through independent reading and community-based conversation, I have a stronger sense of the conceptual underpinnings of these critical ideas and in turn, I have generated a set of forward looking strategies intended to weave threads of interdisciplinarity, project based learning, and open education into my teaching practice. My reading has included How Humans Learn (Eyler) & Generous Thinking (Fitzpatrick) and bits and pieces/select chapters of An Urgency of Teachers (Morris & Stommel), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pedagogy and Place-Based Education (ed. By Shannon & Galle) and Creating Wicked Students (Hanstedt).
While there are challenges to adopting these pedagogies into my teaching, these approaches offer the ripe promise of a rewarding and transformative experience for my students and myself.
Below I articulate some ideas that are percolating for me with respect to my own personal teaching practice, linked to tangible goals for the next year of work in the CPLC.
Interdisciplinarity
Abby Goode’s framing of slow interdisciplinarity struck a chord with me, and has led me to question where, when, and even if our students are explicitly exposed to the epistemologies of the disciplines, particularly what these approaches have in common and where the differences arise. In the past, I have asked my students to think about this by asking them how their major/disciplinary background interfaces with topics we are covering in our course. This is a challenging question for them, and thus is suited for more exploration.
An emergent concept in my teaching practice (related to slow interdisciplinary) is the idea of structural guideposts in learning, or the framing of inquiry at the outset of an investigation (or course). Early in the semester, I frame out the scales or hierarchy of biological organization for my students to help to orient them to the scope of the course they are enrolled in (I find myself doing this in every class I teach these days.). My thinking here is that this provides a coherent structure for what we will learn as the semester progresses. It serves as a touchstone or guiding post for us, such that at any point in our work we can stop and get our bearings as to where we are working on this hierarchical map. I’m starting to think about how I might incorporate a similar, early semester exercise in disciplinary foundations (a disciplinary map, so to speak) that will allow students to grapple with and eventually articulate the research methods, approach, assumptions, mindset, biases, and values/ethics of the field of biology. This would be an instrumental step to working towards interdisciplinary investigations that are predicated upon firm footing in disciplinarity. In the past, I have casually engaged discussions of disciplinary bias (for example) in conver