Reflecting on 30 years of collaborative teaching across disciplines in the Graduate Program on the Environment at The Evergreen State College.

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’

2015 Conference

June 24–27, 2015

San Diego, CA

Reflecting on 30 years of collaborative teaching across disciplines in the Graduate Program on the Environment at The Evergreen State College.

Type of Session

Abstract

Primary Contact

Shangrila Joshi Wynn, Ph.D., The Evergreen State College

Presenters

Co-Authors

Chair, Facilitator, Or Moderators

Martha Henderson, PhD, The Evergreen State College

e-mail address (preferred) or phone number

Discussants

Kevin Francis, PhD, The Evergreen State College

E-mail address (preferred) or phone number

Kathleen Saul, PhD Candidate, University of Delaware

E-mail address (preferred) or phone number

Erin Martin, PhD, The Evergreen State College

E-mail address (preferred) or phone number

Shangrila Joshi Wynn, Ph.D., The Evergreen State College

E-mail address (preferred) or phone number

Workshop Leaders