Holding Complexity: Lessons from Team-Teaching an Interdisciplinary Collegiate Course on Urban Sustainability

Lead instructors discuss the structure, opportunities, and pedagogical challenges of an interdisciplinary team-taught course on urban sustainability involving seven professors from six departments across four of George Washington University’s schools over five years. The teaching team prioritized presenting and exploring diverse perspectives on urban sustainability, seeing a key learning objective of this course in students (1) learning to make links between disciplines; (2) having opportunities to reflect, disagree, share, and develop their own perspectives; and (3) developing a life-long engagement and openness with ideas and learning. This is challenging for many students. To promote student learning and engagement in the class, we utilize active-learning and cooperative discussion techniques, and see these as times that the class reaches “interdisciplinarity”. We employ place-based pedagogical approaches, focusing the class on the case-study (and students’ adopted hometown) of Washington D.C., finding that a “layering” of perspectives on a single city helps students see disciplinary similarities and differences more clearly. For those considering a large-team interdisciplinary course, we stress the importance of a lead instructor for coordination—both conceptually and administratively—and adequate institutional support for this unique and challenging endeavor.

INFORMATION AND METHODOLOGICAL SUPPORT OF STUDENTS’ SELF-GOVERNING INDEPENDENT WORK

The author presents the results of scientific research on informational and educational support of students’ self-organizing independent work, which is complicated and comprehensive, because it includes sequential and consistent execution of large stages of educational and cognitive activity requiring creative approach to decision making. Starting point of this activity is assignment from the lead instructor to study and acquire given learning material. Having received the assignment, the student assesses the individual work effort required to complete it, sets time limits, draws up the schedule, manages the workplace, gets acquainted with information and training materials available and, if necessary, searches for additional required literature. After that, the student is to study educational theoretical material and perform practical exercises and tasks. Finally, he/she carries out self-control of acquired knowledge and skills. Assuming that acquired knowledge and skills do not fully comply with the fund of evaluation assets the student is to reexamine the learning material or correct the mistakes in the practical exercise. The next stage is to submit the accomplished work to the lead instructor. For holistic and figurative appreciation of this complex didactic process pedagogical science uses system modeling. In the present article the author introduces the functional model of students’ self-organizing independent work adapted to distance education. The model under consideration is of practical interest because it can be applied to forecast the process of knowledge acquisition in students’ self-organizing independent work and monitor the influence every link of this work has on the final result of independent work. In the long run, decision is made as to which educational technology proves the best. The efficiency of informational and educational support in the structure of the presented model has been confirmed by the results of the pilot study and final testing.

Multi-University Collaboration via Distance Learning to Train Rural Special Education Teachers and Related Services Personnel

This article describes a multi-university model for delivering a course via distance learning in Kentucky. The course, Transdisciplinary Services to Students with Deafblindness and Other Multiple Disabilities, was offered through compressed video to students at three (3) universities, one (1) private college and four (4) additional sites. A lead instructor (first author) and a team of specialists from various disciplines (e.g., nursing, vision, physical therapy) taught the course. Participating students at the graduate and undergraduate levels observed team assessments, engaged in consensus building activities and developed group projects to develop their teaming skills. Evaluation data, collected at the end of the course, suggest that this format has promise for teaching courses where single institutes of higher education, particularly those in rural regions, may have limited resources. Suggestions are offered for meeting the challenges associated with this type of delivery.