Abstract
According to Carnegie Foundation reports (Boyer, 1987, 1990), students routinely fail to make connections between their core curriculum courses and their major courses. They do not apply the knowledge they gain in academic subjects to the challenges they face in their communities, homes, and workplaces. Complex problems often require solutions that cross academic boundaries; thus, the failure to bridge the theoretical and the concrete is at least partially due to an inability to cross academic disciplines in a coherent fashion. The results are crippling: Many students walk through a series of core curriculum courses without perceiving their interrelatedness. Students have little motivation to connect what they learn elsewhere, and students graduate with little sense of how to identify problems— much less solve them. For those who teach at institutions in which a social science course such as psychology is part of the core curriculum, these curriculum shortcomings present a pedagogical challenge. At Southwest Texas State University, faculty members cooperatively designed an introductory psychology course that encourages interdisciplinary thinking and the appliUsing Technology to Make Connections in the Core Curriculum
Highlights
According to Carnegie Foundation reports (Boyer, 1987, 1990), students routinely fail to make connections between their core curriculum courses and their major courses
The study of the life and work of Vincent van Gogh illustrates how psychoanalytic, behavioral, biological, cognitive, and social psychologists view one phenomenon differently
Disciplines and helps them to transfer material learned in one domain to a concrete problem identified in another domain
Summary
According to Carnegie Foundation reports (Boyer, 1987, 1990), students routinely fail to make connections between their core curriculum courses and their major courses. Students have little motivation to connect what they learn elsewhere, and students graduate with little sense of how to identify problems— much less solve them For those who teach at institutions in which a social science course such as psychology is part of the core curriculum, these curriculum shortcomings present a pedagogical challenge. At Southwest Texas State University, faculty members cooperatively designed an introductory psychology course that encourages interdisciplinary thinking and the application of classroom skills to identifying and solving problems. The course features sessions in which multimedia presentations creatively illustrate psychological content by using material from other disciplines (see Figure 1). Once a coherent clip is complete, the professor uses presentation software to create a series of slides that apply psychological concepts to concrete experience depicted in the film clips.
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