Selected Interdisciplinary Syllabi
An Introduction
In its early days, AIS accumulated a file of syllabi that was made available to interested faculty. This site takes that beginning into the age of technology, making such materials readily accessible to faculty and administrators via the web. We are beginning with a rather small posting, with the site expanding over time.
Why the need for this website? As interdisciplinary studies have become increasingly common nationwide, more and more discipline-trained faculty are entering interdisciplinary teaching. Whether their own convictions and interests or external nudges have led to this move, they are equally likely to be inventing their course in isolation, both from others who have created courses in that subject area and from those who have studied effective approaches to interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Thus a lot of "reinventing the wheel" takes place. Further, faculty are often working without interdisciplinary texts available, or even multidisciplinary texts that at least juxtapose materials from some of the applicable disciplines if not explicitly integrating them.
True, certain interdisciplinary areas of study such as women's studies, American studies, and environmental studies have become so well established that texts and course materials are available. Professional associations in such fields assist in disseminating useful resources. But even in these cases faculty may be unaware of effective models of how to integrate insights from multiple disciplines in their course design, assignments, and pedagogy. And in a great many other cases, faculty lack that grounding in texts and professional associations as well. Faculty wanting to teach a course on epidemics and AIDS, or symmetry in science and art, must pull together their own course materials from here, there, and everywhere, design their own course from scratch, and explore interdisciplinary connections.
As Davis (1995) aptly points out, interdisciplinary teaching by its nature involves "inventing the subject," as faculty work outside traditional disciplinary structures and perhaps also negotiate among differing perspectives and areas of expertise of a faculty team. Faculty now have the benefit of the useful "Guide to Interdisciplinary Syllabus Preparation" (AIS and IIS, 1996). Such inventing can be further assisted by availability of a variety of effective models demonstrating how those principles become instantiated in course design and pedagogy.
Given current web technology, faculty can use search engines to access syllabi in their area of study. However search engines turn up a huge quantity of sites of widely varying degrees of usefulness. Faculty on our campuses and at our annual conference often express interest in finding models of good practice in interdisciplinary studies.
Sharing these models has become especially timely now given the increasing importance of syllabi, nationwide, in the processes of program review and assessment. Faculty are increasingly developing their syllabi more fully, for example to make learning outcomes explicit, and are disseminating syllabi beyond students only.
This website will offer benefits to AIS members and well beyond; to both new and experienced interdisciplinarians; and to submitters as well as searchers. The syllabi can assist faculty in making the leap into interdisciplinary teaching with integrity, whether in similar topic areas or using similar approaches. They can help experienced interdisciplinary faculty learn from each other, enhancing the professional community of interdisciplinarians. Many faculty, as University of Hartford professor Harald Sandström has noted, have been doing "interdisciplinarity by accident." The more we share ideas, the more we can build interdisciplinary practice that is informed by theory and interdisciplinary theory informed by practice.
Scholarship has been defined as a contribution to knowledge that is "public, susceptible to critical review and evaluation, and accessible for exchange and use by other members of one's scholarly community" (Shulman, 1998, p. 5). By sharing course materials on a peer-reviewed website of our professional association, faculty can participate in an important way in the scholarship of interdisciplinary teaching. The syllabi website may well lead to further scholarship: for example, analysis of problems that emerged in teaching a particular interdisciplinary course might become an article for the Association for Integrative Studies Newsletter, while a more-developed response to issues of interdisciplinarity that emerged might be submitted to Issues in Integrative Studies.
References
Association for Integrative Studies and Institute in Integrative Studies.
(1996). Guide to interdisciplinary syllabus preparation. Journal of General
Education, 45, 170-173.
Davis, J. R. (1995). Interdisciplinary courses and team teaching: New arrangements for learning. Phoenix, AZ: American Council on Education and Oryx Press.
Klein, J. T., & Newell, W. H. (1997). Advancing interdisciplinary studies. In J. G. Gaff and J. L. Ratcliff (Ed.), Handbook of the Undergraduate Curriculum. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Shulman, L. (1998). Course anatomy: The dissection and analysis of knowledge through teaching. In P. Hutchings (Ed.), The course portfolio: How faculty can examine their teaching to advance practice and improve student learning (pp. 5-12). Washington, D. C. : AAHE.