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
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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.
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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.
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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 crosspollination. 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.
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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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