Selected Interdisciplinary Syllabi
Invitation for Submission and Criteria for Selection
Have you developed an interdisciplinary course that others could learn from? Does it explicitly draw on multiple disciplines and seek to integrate their insights? Are you interested in sharing your syllabus and assignments with others? We invite you to submit your syllabi and other course materials for possible inclusion in this AIS site.
A suggested starting point is general education courses, since that is the largest category of interdisciplinary courses currently taught across the country and the area of greatest need. These courses could be introductory or capstone level
Course syllabi submitted should meet the definition of interdisciplinarity
given by Klein and Newell (1997) in the Handbook of the Undergraduate
Curriculum: courses should
- "address a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession,"
- "draw on different disciplinary perspectives"
- "integrate their insights through construction of a more comprehensive perspective"
Here, more specifically, are criteria that will be used in selecting syllabi for inclusion:
1. We are seeking rich models that include not only syllabus but handouts and other supporting documents clarifying and fleshing out the interdisciplinary nature of the course.
2. Materials should reveal a self-consciousness about how the course draws on multiple disciplinary perspectives.
3. Materials should reveal a self-consciousness about how the course helps students integrate those perspectives. This conscious integration will be key, since so many courses juxtapose without integration or ask students somehow to integrate what course design and pedagogy have not.
4. Materials should be explicit about learning outcomes for students, including issues of interdisciplinary learning. Materials should be explicit about how progress toward these outcomes will be evaluated.
Interested faculty can forward submissions electronically to pgagnon@westga.edu.
The submission should be in the form of either:
- URL of your course website, which includes links to materials illustrating the interdisciplinary workings of the course (preferred, if available)
- email attachments in MSWord
In all cases faculty retain copyright to their own material, and readers
will be encouraged to acknowledge any use of materials found on the AIS
site (see Note on Acknowledgments). To assist
in ongoing appropriate acknowledgment of your work, please include a
line at the bottom of your syllabus with the copyright symbol, your name
(including your email address, if you are willing), and date.
This is a peer-reviewed web site. Thus only a percentage of the submissions
will be posted. Many excellent courses have strengths in areas other
than their interdisciplinarity. In addition, many excellent courses are
far more interdisciplinary in their actual processes than their syllabi
show. Since all we and readers of this site have to go on is course documents,
we will continue to post syllabi that most clearly reveal a course's
interdisciplinary nature.
For further information, please contact Pauline Gagnon at pgagnon@westga.edu,
phone 678-839-4706, or write her c/o Martha Munro Bldg 207B, University
of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia 30118.