Abstract
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.
Highlights
Sustainability education has helped motivate university leaders to think beyond traditional boundaries and see the value in interdisciplinary approaches involving collaboration between experts from two or more academic disciplines (Jabareen 2012)
The course utilizes cooperative discussion strategies and place-based learning to focus discussions of urban sustainability and help students engage and hold the conceptual complexity explored in this interdisciplinary course
We have found team-teaching to be a highly valuable method to explore the complexities of sustainability and to challenge students to consider the perspectives of multiple disciplines in a more nuanced fashion
Summary
Sustainability education has helped motivate university leaders to think beyond traditional boundaries and see the value in interdisciplinary approaches involving collaboration between experts from two or more academic disciplines (Jabareen 2012). In the spring of 2016, seven faculty at George Washington. University (GWU) launched a team-taught undergraduate course titled “The Sustainable City”. The course is innovative in several ways It represents an extreme of interdisciplinarity, in that is taught by not just two faculty but a team of seven. The course is constructed such that a different mix of faculty collaborate and share teaching responsibilities each class period (rather than dividing up weeks in a semester). The course utilizes cooperative discussion strategies and place-based learning (in our “hometown” of Washington D.C.) to focus discussions of urban sustainability and help students engage and hold the conceptual complexity explored in this interdisciplinary course
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