Ensuring Student Success Through Innovative Interdisciplinary Faculty Development Beverly Dolinsky, Ph.D. Endicott Colle

1. Ensuring Student Success Through Innovative Interdisciplinary Faculty Development Beverly Dolinsky, Ph.D. Endicott College Donna Qualters, Ph.D. Northeastern University

2. Goals of this Session • General background and issues in general education • Share ideas about general education implementation • Discuss ways to involve faculty

3. What are your concerns and challenges on your campus • General education issues? • Faculty involvement?

4. “General or liberal education has been challenged on the basis of its failure to provide an integrated learning experience, with a national movement away from distribution requirements and toward more coherent core curricula” Fuhrmann (1998).

5. Colleges must be held accountable for the knowledge and skills of their graduates Higher education does not precede productive work Colleges should provide both a common core of learning and a wide variety of professional preparation The values of a liberal education must again become the foundation of a professional preparation Colleges should prepare all students for productive employment Students must learn to manage change Students should learn to interact in a variety of cultural environments Interdisciplinary work and understanding must be fostered along with specialized knowledge and skills Students learn in a variety of ways: all must be understood and fostered Higher Education in the 21st Century

6. A Call for Intentional Practice • Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College (AACU, 2002) • Purposeful Pathways: Helping Students Achieve Key Learning Outcomes (AACU, 2006) • Liberal arts is the foundation of practice education. • Students want practice only • Faculty want theory only • A need for integration

7. Intentional Learners • The Empowered Learner • Communication skills , multiple problem solving skills, works well in teams • The Informed Learner • Uses imagination and creativity, cross cultural understanding, modeling the natural world • The Responsible Learner • Active citizen, understanding of one’s self

8. Intentional Practice • Integrative Learning • Diverse points of view, connections across domains and skills, adaptation • Inquiry Learning • Seek own theories, answers; ask questions, design methodologies, analyze and interpret data • Global Learning • Knowledge of world diversity, recognize different perspectives • Civic Learning • Facilitate collective work to protect life, liberty, equality and democratic practices

9. A Curriculum to Promote Intentional Learning Has • Coherence and purposeful pathways reflecting mission and its corresponding objectives. • Interdisciplinary curriculum • Assessment - Regular points to demonstrate achievement within courses and programs (Leskes, 2004)

10. Coherent Curriculum • “Simply providing students with a wide range of choices to fulfill breadth and depth requirements attempting to ensure exposure to arts and humanities, social sciences, mathematics, and the life and physical sciences, is not enough …. • Students should be offered more opportunities to figure out how different elements, themes, or ideas can be connected and applied to social situations and human reflection”. (Ratcliff, 1997)

11. Interdisciplinary Curriculum • Interdisciplinary studies is “a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession (Klein and Newell, 1998, p 3)

12. Free-standing institutions Autonomous and cluster colleges Centers and institutes Interdisciplinary departments Interdisciplinary majors, minors and concentrations (Klein and Newall, 1998, p 6-7) Mainstream and alternative general education programs Individual courses within disciplinary departments Tutorials Independent study and self-designed majors Travel-study, internships and practicum's Traditional and Familiar Forms of Interdisciplinary Structures

13. Learning communities First Year Experience Senior Capstones Service Learning Experiential Learning Authentic Tasks ( collective projects, student research) Problem-focused learning Interdisciplinary Instruction Intentional Practice: Curricular and Pedagogical Practices

14. Roadblocks to Intentional Practice • Graduate programs teach content not teacher preparation • Research on student learning and pedagogy is marginalized or ignored • Few incentives to change or improve • Fear of systematic and continuous assessment • Bok, 2006

15. Inderdisciplinary Faculty Development:Objectives for this part: • Share experiences with interdisciplinary work in general education • Discuss characteristics of faculty who work well in interdisciplinary settings • Share 10 stages of interdisciplinary projects with examples

16. Interdisciplinary Experience • What have been the challenges to working in an interdisciplinary project? • What have been the rewards?

17. Successful characteristics of faculty • Research supports the belief that senior faculty are the best suited for interdisciplinary activity • No danger about tenure/contract renewal • Often looking for a new challenge BUT coupled with this are the following characteristics for success:

18. Interdisciplinary faculty are: • Reliable • Flexible • Patient • Resilient • Sensitive to others • Risk-takers • Thick skinned

19. Interdisciplinary faculty are: • Prefer new social roles • Know how to learn new things • Know how and when to ask for information • Know how to acquire a working knowledge of language, concepts, information and analytic skills needed

20. Interdisciplinary faculty are: • Open to diverse ways of thinking • Wary of absolutism • Unconventional • Self-reflective • Good at listening • Comfortable with ambiguity

21. “The ideal person would be someone with a high degree of ego strength, tolerance for ambiguity, considerable initiative and assertiveness, a broad education and a sense of dissatisfaction with monodisciplinary constraints.” Armstrong, 1980

22. Sverre Sjolander 10 stages to Interdisciplinary Projects • “Singing the Old Songs” • “Everybody on the other side is an idiot!” • Issues here: • Surfacing assumptions/beliefs • Creating a non - judgmental climate • Creating a climate of listening

23. What do you do? • Training • Active listening • Ice Breakers • Dialogue • MIT • Used successfully in NSF interdisciplinary project

24. Sverre Sjolander 10 stages to Interdisciplinary Projects 3. “retreating into abstractions” 4. “definition of sickness” • Issues • Language usage • Power struggles • Epistemological differences

25. What do you do? • Informal gatherings • Wine/cheese • Dinners • Establish ground rules around language and affect • Generative listening • “what does it mean to you”

26. Sverre Sjolander 10 stages to Interdisciplinary Projects • “jumping the tussocks” • “the glass bead game” • Issues • Lack of focus • Weariness

27. What do you do? • Take a break! • Slow down weekly meetings • Provide a social event • Have a structure for the planning process

28. Interdisciplinary Planning Process Identifying essential concepts Evidence determine success Critical content Title Knowledge skills needed acquire Essential questions

29. Interdisciplinary Planning Process Identifying essential concepts Evidence determine success Critical content Multiple Voices of America Knowledge skills needed acquire Essential questions

30. Sverre Sjolander 10 stages to Interdisciplinary Projects • “the greatest failure” • “what’s happening to me” • Issues • Disequilibrium • Lack of metacognition

31. What do you do? • Reports • Writing process as critical analysis • Reflective activities • Journaling • Blogs and chatrooms • Sharing insights • metaphors

32. Sverre Sjolander 10 stages to Interdisciplinary Projects • “getting to know the enemy” • “the REAL beginning” CELEBRATION

33. What • Resonates? • What makes you bristle?