Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning: Two Heads Might Actually Be Better than One
In this interconnected, socially networked, 24/7, multidimensional, media-centric culture, your students are doing just fine creating, performing, and making things without your help. Thanks to the proliferation of user-friendly, intuitive software applications to create, capture, and perform music, as well as websites that allow easy showing and sharing of these creations, your students can lead very productive, creative, and expressive lives without the baggage of learning traditional music notation and computer code. This realization sends shudders through some of our fellow professors, but nonetheless it is a reality of our times. You can choose to fight these trends and hold fast to the traditions of an educational system designed for another era and different priorities, or you can meet your students where they are. Much of education has been about the transmission of subject-specific content with a focus on the individual. This fosters competition for the teacher’s attention and top grades. Hierarchical classrooms perpetuate the notion of teachers as authority figures and decision makers while supplicant students wait for the teacher’s knowledge to be bestowed upon them. Socialization is rarely encouraged inside the classroom. On the other hand, the modern workplace is flattening its hierarchical structure and becoming ever more dependent upon critical thinking skills, collaboration, teamwork, and shared decision making. In fact, many corporate offices are being designed physically to foster collaboration through shared offices and informal small lounges where workers can gather to brainstorm. Learning to work with others is a lifelong endeavor. These skill sets don’t develop in a vacuum. They need to be nurtured through modeling and experience. As suggested by John-Steiner, students need to be socialized into the culture of collaborative work and the kinds of creative and critical thinking the new workplace requires. As you will discover, collaborative work yields processes and results that are far richer than any that a single person’s expertise can produce.