Questions emailed April 19, 2010
FIRST EMAIL RESPONSE
IDENTIFY URI BARRIERS TO INTERDISCIPLINARY WORK
Departments and colleges currently are teaching so many courses that it is too overwhelming to consider creating new courses and offering them.
Resources are allocated at the department (and college) level.
Faculty have been trained in an historical discipline and, at least at the research level, have been rewarded with grants for becoming more and more specialized.
Curriculum demands within each major are a major barrier. I have met many faculty with whom I’ve shared a strong interest in collaborating on interdisciplinary classes, but the demands of delivery of the established curriculum for our respective majors created insurmountable barriers.
Adverse impact on faculty/student class size ratio when multiple faculty are involved in delivering a course simultaneously. Adding students from all involved departments creates classes that are too large.
Earning time/effort teaching credit for co-teaching courses that do not serve the central interests of their home departments. The problem grows as the number of faculty and disciplines expand and the distance from the central core increases.
Example from IGERT, which was multidisciplinary. Teaching was done on overload, which is clearly not a sustainable model.
It isn’t in our current culture; that would have to change.
Workload issue, particularly for junior faculty.
No organizational structure or incentives to facilitate interdisciplinary. I suspect that there is more competition for students then incentives for collaborative teaching across disciplines.
Unclear which department would provide resources.
And some testimony from elsewhere:
From The College of William and Mary (and I quote)
“That said, as acting director of our interdisciplinary Environmental Science and Policy program, I can say that institutional support of interdisciplinary activities is not very strong. Like most schools, we are not set up to reward faculty who cross department or program lines. Such activity takes away from course offerings and research in the home department, and faculty may in fact be penalized for crossing over. One of our top environmental faculty members, for example, was almost denied tenure because half his home department voted him off the island for teaching and publishing in interdisciplinary field. He now doesn’t participate in our program as much, unfortunately.”
DESCRIBE A SUCCESSFUL RECENT/CURRENT INTERDISCIPLINARY EFFORT ON OUR CAMPUS
The NSF-funded Coastal Institute IGERT project was terrifically successful by any measure. From 2005 to present, it has supported 23 Ph.D. students across three colleges and eight departments. It resulted in scores of publications in coastal ecosystem management and spawned many new alliances of faculty and graduate student research teams. The students produced scientifically strong research in partnership with many non-academic partners at the University (Park Service, EOA, NOAA, Nature Conservancy, CRMC, Senators Whitehouse and Chafee). New courses were developed for the IGERT program, and it is leaving a legacy of multidisciplinary scholarship
We are developing an interdisciplinary program in neuroscience and have been getting good attendance at our general meetings.
WMS, ECON and AAF in FY ’10 hosted Distinguished International Scholar to present lectures and teach a split online and face-to-face Gender, Economics and Sustainable Development seminar.
Colleges of Pharmacy and Business are working together to deliver the joint Pharmd/MBA program; additionally, pharmacy courses in Pharmaceoeconomics and Health Systems are included as required courses in a new customized MBA program presently being delivered onsite in Connecticut to a cohort of Pfizer employees.
Collaborative research and teaching by Graham Forrester (NRS) and Tracy Dalton (Marine Affairs) to look at marine protected areas.
In Film Media we are developing a gaming minor, in collaboration with computer science, communications studies and graduate library sciences. Gaming, like most new media technologies, requires teams with diverse skills—so it necessarily is an interdisciplinary effort if it is to happen at all.
Partnership programs created in the Carothers administration. These were designed to increase interdisciplinary work and the involvement of undergraduates in research. Given that administration, the latter was favored over the former. Some examples of undergrad involvement still exist, e.g., Coastal Fellows in CELS, but the partnerships were expected to become self-supporting after three years of University investment. In my experience, it was difficult to do that because funding agencies were not yet rewarding interdisciplinary proposals as broad as the ones we were submitting.
NSF IGERT grant trains grad students broadly in natural and social sciences related to the coast. Involves NRS< GSO< ENRE< maybe others.
Coastal Institute==established as a center where science can be brought to bear on matters of public policy.
IDENTIFY A POLICY, PRACTICE OR PROCEDURE THAT WE COULD CHANGE:
Offer incentives for communicating across disciplines and colleges to explore means of inviting students from multiple disciplines to register in the same course.
Make cross-listing easier.
Create two pools of cross-disciplinary funds: one to motivate research and the other to motivate teaching.
I don’t know of any particular policy; it seems resources are so scarce that no one wants to share anything.
I hate to say it, but throwing money at the problem is required. When $150K /yr for three years was available for the Partnerships, you could see the smoke being generated as people got together. Other than that, credit must be properly given (and work must be properly performed) for a true interdisciplinary course to be valued by faculty.
It’s all about time. Most of us have a 3/3 teaching load and are committed to our research/artistic practice. And those of us interested in interdisciplinary collaborations also seem to be the same individuals performing the most service. If we had a 2/2 teaching load, (within a 4-credit curriculum), that time not spent in the classroom would significantly facilitate interdisciplinary work.
Once each semester partnering colleges/departments/units could hold a joint faculty meeting to discuss interdisciplinary issues in teaching, scholarship and service
Have deans recognize the legitimacy of this in work/effort planning and report.
The VP for Research should be the number one cheerleader and marriage-maker among groups that could form interdisciplinary work groups.
In which department would a faculty member be reviewed if given a joint appointment? What happens when a department states it is unable to judge the merit of a body of work that employs methods not regularly in its fields or published in journal they are not familiar with.
Which department(s) would be responsible for providing support (administrative, space, TA's, etc.) and how this would affect workload plans, teaching assignments, advising responsibilities?
EXAMPLES FROM WHERE IT WORKS WELL
Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment: Provost-level funding for faculty that are joint appointments. Recent examples include environmental health (med school), environmental engineering (engineering), environmental law (law school). The issues surround teaching because it requires faculty meeting to hammer out appropriate content.
SUNY Cortland learned to work closely with department chairs from the beginning; “teach” faculty how to make a course experience truly disciplinary. Team teaching, not turn teaching; make planning for such courses explicit in teaching assignments; decide from the start whether courses will be temporary or permanent; start with a special topics courses and work out the kinks.
Georgetown University has an interdisciplinary neuroscience program. The faculty don’t have to teach if they don’t want to so they have more time for collaboration.
At Louisiana Tech University the Academic Directors (chairs) have their expertise from areas other than the department they are heading. This is like cross-pollination. the Ads help introduce faculty from different departments and disciplines.
Joint programs at the U of Maryland between Engineering and Business, between Business and Foreign Languages and between Business and Computer Science. The key that makes this work is that financial proceeds of such programs are shared equally between the campus and each of the academic areas.
For interdisciplinary majors, faculty developed core introductory courses that were team taught by three or four faculty in different fields. Each faculty member taught approximately ¼ to 1/3 of the course. A one-credit teaching responsibility for a team-taught course could work well with the 4-credit curriculum model for us at URI.
Master’s four-credit level research course with students from Nursing, Nutrition, Kinesiology and Speech Pathology. Two credits of lecture and two of lab. Students spend one lab hour together and the other in their discipline group with their faculty member. Course is being offered first time this semester but early reports are encouraging. Four faculty members co-teaching; each attends every meeting. About 40 students in the course.
New undergraduate Health Studies major soon to the CAC being developed by committee of faculty members from Kinesiology, CELS, Business, several A & S departments, Pharmacy and Nursing.
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