Reflecting on 30 years of collaborative teaching across disciplines in the Graduate Program on the Environment at The Evergreen State College.
Friday, June 26, 2015 at 11:00 AM–12:30 PM PDT
224B Center Hall
Type of Session
Abstract
This discussion symposium will reflect on collaborative interdisciplinary teaching as practiced by faculty in the Graduate Program on the Environment. Our goal is to share with the broader AESS community what is going well in our program and what we see as areas for improvement. We invite others to join us in a discussion on the overarching question: What lessons have we learned from engaging in collaborative team-teaching across disciplines at Evergreen, and how applicable are these lessons for collaborative interdisciplinary teaching at other institutions?
The Evergreen State College has practiced collaborative team-teaching across disciplines since its creation in 1967. While this pedagogical approach is the norm at Evergreen and is supported by our structures, we realize that our experiences may not easily translate to other institutional contexts. At this discussion symposium, panelists will consider how our approaches to interdisciplinary team-teaching might be translated to other colleges and universities with more traditional structures.
We will share insights from the perspectives of program directors, faculty engaged in team-teaching, and students. Panelists will open with brief remarks focused on the following themes:
Administrative:
- Reflections from administrative leadership on how the program has changed over time and factors contributing to program success
Curriculum Planning:
- Team-teaching logistics
- Negotiating curriculum across gender, seniority, disciplines, and the positivist/post-positivist epistemological divide
- Designing graduate level curriculum for a diverse group of students with different undergraduate backgrounds
- Moving from multi-disciplinary to interdisciplinary teaching
Pedagogy:
- Successful examples of interdisciplinary and collaborative assignments
- Strategies for inculcating effective collaboration and communication skills across disciplinary boundaries towards real-world environmental problem-solving
- Balancing disciplinary grounding and interdisciplinary pedagogy
- Balancing breadth and depth of material in limited time and space
- Teaching across difference (race/class/gender, epistemological positions)
- Student perspectives on how the graduate program has enabled multi-dimensional/multi-disciplinary explorations of the world, and facilitated ‘thinking outside the box’
Primary Contact
Shangrila Joshi Wynn, Ph.D., The Evergreen State College
Chair, Facilitator,s or Moderator
Martha Henderson, PhD, The Evergreen State College
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Discussants
Kevin Francis, PhD, The Evergreen State College
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Kathleen Saul, PhD Candidate, University of Delaware
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Erin Martin, PhD, The Evergreen State College
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Shangrila Joshi Wynn, Ph.D., The Evergreen State College
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