The Synergistic Classroom: Interdisciplinary Teaching in the Small College Setting

Classroom

Introduction

Building Bridges in a Land of Colleges

COREY CAMPION

Each fall thousands of recent high school graduates exchange the comforts and constraints of their childhood home for the uncertainty and freedom of a college classroom. The product of years of encouragement from parents, teachers, and coaches, their arrival on campus marks at once the end of one journey and the beginning of another. From the struggle to decide if and when to go to college, students quickly shift their attention to questions about how to succeed in college. Although Study! may appear to be the obvious answer, many first-year students will agree that this is easier said than done. With bi- or triweekly meetings, lecture and seminar formats, attention to disciplinary and methodological concerns, and heavy reading and writing loads, college classes bear little resemblance to the world of secondary education with which new students are most familiar. If some of these challenges dissipate with time and experience, one additional burden weighs on students throughout their collegiate tenure: the need to secure a job upon graduation. More than ever, this task, which requires anticipating the demands of future employers, appears challenging, if not impossible, for many students. From globalization to automation, rapid change appears to be the only constant feature of an increasingly ephemeral job market. Echoing the predictions of business leaders across a variety of industries, Dell Technology recently suggested that more than half of the jobs that will be available in 2030 do not yet exist. As today’s college graduates enter the workforce, the company advised, they should be prepared for a lifetime of retraining.¹ Proffered amid soaring tuition costs and constant reporting on the dangers of student debt, such advice offers little solace for students desperate to make their college investment pay dividends.

Of course, students are not the only constituency affected by their uncertain career prospects. Growing expectations for the academy to ensure employment for its graduates challenge faculty and administrators as well. Increasingly, many of the departmental majors and minors that inform today’s college curricula and correspond to faculty expertise and interest appear ill-equipped to prepare students for a lifetime of retraining.² Stagnating or declining enrollments in traditional majors like English, political science, and journalism affirm this reality, to which many institutions have responded with the creation of dozens of new professionally focused majors. From nursing, athletic training, and sports management to computer science, applied science, and business, American colleges and universities created over 300 new majors between 2000 and 2010 alone.³ In addition, faculty and administrators have designed a host of new pathways to enable students to pursue double majors, or an interdisciplinary combination of majors and minors, within the traditional four-year period of study or less. While such innovation has become the norm throughout higher education, the meaning and experience of such innovation at the nation’s smaller colleges and universities remain underexplored. The present collection responds to this oversight.

Pursuing innovative pedagogy in a unique setting within the broader American academy, the volume’s contributors share their creative responses to a host of recent studies that demonstrate the need for curricular revisions beyond a simple repackaging of current discipline-based offerings. According to one such study, conducted by the Association of American Colleges & Universities in 2009, fewer than half of the employers interviewed felt that the curriculum at two- and four-year institutions was well suited to prepare students for the workplace. Suggesting a shift away from discipline-specific training, the survey revealed a preference for liberal education curricula that provide a breadth of skill sets alongside expertise in a given field. Among those skills most emphasized were knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world, effective oral and written communication, collaboration, and an ability to approach an issue from multiple perspectives.⁴ More recently, a 2016 study produced by the World Economic Forum, which gathered input from employers both in the United States and abroad, reached similar conclusions. Those surveyed identified a list of skills essential for employment beyond 2025, including cognitive flexibility, effective communication, emotional intelligence, and teamwork.⁵ Taken together, these studies suggest that skills, which can be learned in any number of disciplines, are growing more important than training in a particular discipline.

For faculty, this news can prove both threatening and inspiring. On the one hand, disciplinarity provides faculty with an early sense of professional identity along with a pathway toward attaining the PhD, securing a tenure-track position, and earning tenure and promotion. Their disciplines also reflect their interests and house the objects of the intense curiosity that led them to pursue the life academic. From graduate school through retirement, then, most faculty exist, and thrive, within a disciplinary community. They serve in a history, or biology, or English department, and they attend conferences, join associations, and publish papers in those disciplines. Of course, most faculty also teach in their discipline, designing syllabi, delivering content, and assessing student work through the unique perspectives of their chosen field. Although most faculty would rank helping their students succeed among their top priorities, suggestions to weaken or betray their own disciplinary loyalties in order to satisfy the current, and impermanent, demands of employers can prove difficult to digest. Knowledge of the fact that professional advancement has always ranked among the top motivations of college students does little to alleviate the tension that persists between the values of faculty committed to the vocation of learning and students who pursue learning as a means to a vocation.⁶

On the other hand, disciplinary identities can be limiting, restricting an instructor’s syllabi, a department’s curriculum, and an institution’s relationship to the broader student body. Excepting the few who continue to pursue careers in academia, the reality remains that even the most passionate undergraduate students will spend most of their life in a world that bears few of the disciplinary markers of their campus. To the extent, then, that faculty are willing to allow their classrooms to model the world for which they are preparing students, they have an opportunity to serve students in a more enduring fashion. In the meantime, such pedagogical flexibility can pay dividends in scholarship as well. Helping students to approach a topic from multiple viewpoints or to master the skills needed in a variety of fields can free faculty to revise and broaden their own analytical agendas. It can invite collaboration with colleagues normally isolated by the physical geography of the discipline-based campus. Invitations, for example, to a microbiologist to deliver a guest lecture in a historian’s class on urbanization can both enrich students’ understanding of the meaning of life in nineteenth-century cities and open a line of collegial dialogue that strengthens the historian’s forthcoming study of modern Paris or the microbiologist’s request for funding to study vaccine administration in inner cities. By helping students, then, to navigate the transitions between fields required by a lifetime of retraining, faculty can reap their own professional rewards.⁷ Addressed, in part, to those faculty open to such endeavors, this volume explores the pedagogical, institutional, and intellectual benefits and challenges that can attend the development of interdisciplinary classrooms.

Tearing Down Silos or Building Bridges?

Among the topics that have most moved the pens of academics and observers of higher education in the last decade, interdisciplinarity has been among the most contentious. From questions about the assessment of interdisciplinary scholarship and its potential value in doctoral programs to calls for a rethinking of traditional curricula and invitations to humanists to engage today’s pressing economic and scientific debates, interdisciplinarity is a recurring theme in the news of higher education. The frequency of such coverage, which often features the metaphors of tearing down disciplinary silos and building interdisciplinary bridges, is evidence of the intense, even personal, reflection through which many academics are now reevaluating the character and function of the academy in the twenty-first century.

Adding to such evidence is a steady stream of essays and monographs by faculty and administrators. In addition to calls for the abolition of departments and passionate ripostes detailing the centrality of the disciplines to the mission of higher education, this literature includes a variety of more prescriptive, less polemical contributions.⁸ These cover topics ranging from strategies for incentivizing interdisciplinary research to reflections on how to facilitate scholarly exchange across methodological boundaries and inspire administrators and faculty to embrace collaboration as part of their institutional mission.⁹ Other authors have located current interdisciplinary initiatives within a broader historical context, exploring how the definitions of successful and failed collaborations have evolved over time. In the process, they offer an important reminder that while our present focus on interdisciplinarity is perhaps more intense, efforts to connect scholarship and learning across the disciplines date at least to the 1920s, when the modern disciplinary landscape was still in its infancy, and were a staple of academic discourse throughout the second half of the twentieth century.¹⁰ Whether one is a proponent of building bridges or maintaining silos, these works offer reassurance by recalling how change rarely, if ever, comes to the academy without careful and lengthy deliberation. Of course, as some of the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the pressure to meet student needs is leading some of the nation’s smaller institutions to shift their deliberations from questions of whether to pursue interdisciplinarity to discussions of how best to do so.

With this shift in mind, contributions to the last decade of spirited and insightful dialogue have left two issues underexplored. First, most authors neglect the practice of interdisciplinary teaching in favor of discussing interdisciplinary research and institutional organization. While the latter are important, the former merits greater attention in light of the growing demand that colleges and universities provide broader curricula to help students achieve their professional goals. As faculty, departments, and institutions work to meet these demands, the literature would do well to explore the specific experiences of those facilitating interdisciplinary learning in the classroom. From this, a second overlooked issue emerges: the influence of the institutional setting on an instructor’s pedagogy. Indeed, many of the authors engaged in conversations about interdisciplinarity work in larger research-driven institutions or focus their work on these. Given the fact that colleges and universities with annual enrollments of more than 10,000 students serve the majority of undergraduates pursuing a four-year degree in an on-campus setting, this focus is not without merit.¹¹ Still, the landscape of American higher education features hundreds of smaller, teaching-focused institutions with much lower annual enrollments. Operating with fewer resources these schools pursue unique missions in a setting that is often more conducive to teaching across the disciplines than that at larger schools. For these reasons the efforts of small college and university faculty to create innovative, synergistic classrooms are worthy of greater attention in any conversation about interdisciplinarity.

A Land of Colleges?

In 2020, America appears to be a land of large public research universities. With medical and law schools that rank among the world’s most prestigious institutions, faculty research that leads the world’s battles against cancer, poverty and climate change, and athletic teams which now vie with their professional counterparts for popularity and revenue, these schools have come to dominate the higher education marketplace. Thanks to lucrative endowments, a growing online presence, and a branch campus system that creates service webs similar to those of national and global retail chains, this dominance seems to strengthen with each academic year. Combined with images of their expanding campuses, state-of-the-art laboratories, and resort-like dormitories, such realities make it easy to forget the relative youth of large institutions in the longer history of American higher education.

Born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large research universities marked a dramatic departure from the traditional smaller liberal arts academies and colleges that had educated the nation’s students since the colonial era. As industrialization demanded greater specialization from the American workforce, the professional and pedagogical value of more advanced academic research and training, such as that pioneered by German universities, became obvious to many of the nation’s instructors and administrators.¹² Embracing the German model along with its requirement that professors hold a doctorate and demonstrate excellence in their field through scholarship, a number of American colleges, including Harvard and Yale, undertook to transform themselves into research institutions. At the same time, the Morrill Act of 1862 provided public funding for the establishment of a host of state colleges and universities, which soon adopted similar research missions. As the twentieth century began, these new schools continued to grow and, with the dramatic expansion of American higher education that attended the passage of the G.I. Bill in 1944, soon began to assume pride of place in the arena of postsecondary education.

Amid the advent and expansion of larger institutions, however, thousands of American students continued to attend those smaller schools, whose columned brick buildings, grassy courtyards, and cozy campuses offered an alluring alternative to the sprawling universities. Often, these schools catered to students of a particular religious faith or geographic region with a combination of general and specialized education that previewed the liberal arts curricula still in place on many of these campuses today. Unlike their colleagues at larger institutions, whose focus remained on research and whose classroom presence lessened with the advent of graduate assistants, the faculty at these smaller schools functioned as scholar-teachers, pursuing research when possible yet prioritizing the teaching of young minds.¹³ After an inauspicious start, which saw the number of colleges only expand from 9 to 25 by the early nineteenth century, immigration, westward expansion, and economic development inspired a wave of new institutions. Calling for the trend to continue, the Massachusetts pastor Absalom Peters predicted that the United States was destined to be a land of colleges.¹⁴ Validating his prediction, 250 small colleges had begun to offer instruction by the start of the Civil War. While the struggle to balance small enrollments with rising operating expenses forced some of these to close their doors, 180 institutions survived and became the elders of a small-college community that continued to expand throughout the twentieth century.¹⁵ Today, 1,263 of the nation’s degree-granting four-year colleges and universities operate with annual enrollments of fewer than 5,000 students. Of these institutions, 464 enroll fewer than 1,000 students each year. By contrast, large institutions, which enroll at least 10,000 students per year, number fewer than 200.¹⁶ In numeric terms, at least, the nation truly remains a land of colleges.

Yet, as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century institutions struggling to find their place in the twenty-first century, many of the nation’s small colleges and universities now fear for their survival. Shrinking demographics have resulted in smaller incoming classes while rising operating costs have made unpopular tuition increases inevitable. The results have been well chronicled in both the popular and the higher education press. From the trauma of Sweet Briar’s near-closing in 2015 to a steady stream of headlines predicting the imminent collapse of many, if not most, of the nation’s smaller institutions, it is hard to avoid describing Peters’s land of colleges as anything but doomed.¹⁷ To be sure, larger institutions also face uncertainty amid the current demographic trends and rising student and parent concerns over the affordability of higher education. Yet there is an important difference between the ways in which small and large institutions can weather this shared storm. As one former small college president observed, the pressures on all institutions are similar, but the tolerance for institutional error and institutional crisis is exponentially minuscule at the small, the tuition-driven, the experimental, the curricularly focused, and the relatively new.¹⁸

This minuscule room for error notwithstanding, the contributors to the present volume believe that faculty at the nation’s smaller colleges and universities have at least three reasons for hope. First, the long history of these institutions speaks to their adaptability and the tremendous value that their students, communities, and alumni have continued to find in them. As recent defenses of the small college experience remind us, these institutions have a cultural currency rooted in both their historic connections to their surrounding communities and the proven value of their more personalized pedagogical approach.¹⁹ Second, smaller budgets can combine with limited institutional resources and shrinking enrollments to create unique incentives, not found at larger schools, to develop the innovative coursework that students most need. Finally, if the current synergy between employer demands and student expectations continues to invite the development of more interdisciplinary curricula, the historic liberal arts traditions of smaller colleges and universities may prove more aligned with the future mission of higher education than headlines now predict.

Written by faculty committed to refuting such headlines, this collection draws needed attention to the practice of interdisciplinary teaching in an underexplored arena of academia. In doing so, it addresses any reader curious about how interdisciplinarity continues to shape pedagogy across the diverse landscape of American higher education. More importantly, however, the volume offers practical reflections written by and for small college and university faculty interested in introducing or enhancing interdisciplinary approaches in their own classrooms.²⁰ With both audiences in mind, the authors have eschewed theoretical reflections in favor of practical discussions. Together, they offer a broad, though not comprehensive, exploration of the pedagogical, programmatic, experiential, and assessment-related aspects of many common teaching endeavors, including team-taught courses, first-year seminars, honors programs, study abroad initiatives, and campus–community partnerships. With this approach, the volume does not espouse a specific definition of interdisciplinarity but rather invites comparative reflection on the various ways in which faculty across different campuses, or even on the same campus, interpret this contested term.²¹ From those instructors who work alone and incorporate multiple disciplinary angles into their lessons to colleagues who have developed new team-taught courses that transcend their respective disciplines, the authors demonstrate how faculty have renegotiated disciplinary boundaries in ways that best serve their unique student bodies.

The essays, which may be read either individually or in sequence, are divided into three sections that focus on interdisciplinary teaching, program development, and experiential learning at the undergraduate level. While the role of interdisciplinarity in the graduate classroom remains an important and welcome subject for future research, the unique institutional and curricular realities that confront graduate programs merit a more comprehensive discussion than the present volume offers. In the first section, Teaching across the Disciplines, the authors share their experiences in interdisciplinary classrooms and invite readers to consider important questions about the value and practice of team teaching as well as the assessment of student work across disciplines and the negotiation of shared faculty workloads. The section begins with an essay by Aaron Angello, who draws on his own experiences teaching digital humanities to consider the anxiety that interdisciplinarity creates for small college faculty whose institutional setting regularly requires them to teach beyond their discipline-specific training. Paul D. Reich then examines the role of first-year seminars in fostering interdisciplinarity and the ways in which such courses can fail to meet their potential when driven by established disciplinary interests. Addressing an important corollary to first-year programs, Patricia Marchesi explores her experiences using composition courses to expose students to multiple fields. The section then ends with three case studies of innovative approaches to interdisciplinarity within and beyond the humanities. Patrick L. Hamilton and Allan W. Austin review their efforts to combine history and English in a course on graphic narratives in the postwar United States, while Christine Dehne and Jonathan Munson reflect on their work connecting digital media and computer science and the ways in which their collaboration in the classroom has helped to challenge the disciplinary mindset of their institution. Finally, Corey Campion and April M. Boulton discuss their transdisciplinary course Globalization and the Honeybee, which invites students from history, environmental science, and global studies to explore the history and science of apiculture and engage the campus community with a variety of research projects and public education initiatives.

In the second section, Programming across the Disciplines, attention turns to the design of interdisciplinary programs that serve the unique student populations at small colleges while achieving broader institutional goals. Erika Cornelius Smith and Maryann Conrad explore how their institution leveraged the flexibility of its small size and collaborative culture to create three interdisciplinary programs to enhance the school’s business-focused curriculum through the liberal arts. Similarly, Julia F. Klimek discusses how a shift away from discipline-specific programs can help many small colleges meet the needs of their growing populations of low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented students. Christine D. Myers and Audra L. Goach then explore ways to enhance students’ professional training through a review of their work developing a multidisciplinary minor in investigative forensics that grapples with limited institutional resources by building on their own existing courses. Hilary Cooperman shifts the discussion to a hallmark of many small liberal arts colleges, the general education program, and considers the challenges and opportunities of building an interdisciplinary curriculum that meets the needs of twenty-first-century students. On a similar note, Winston Ou draws unique attention to the interdisciplinary potential of mathematics and reviews his work designing and teaching math courses for a core curriculum in interdisciplinary humanities. Finally, Lana A. Whited and Sharon E. Stein consider honors programs as a key arena for interdisciplinarity and reflect on both the opportunities and the challenges that such programs present for students and faculty.

In the third and final section, Exploring across the Disciplines, the volume turns to the development of interdisciplinary experiential learning and community engagement opportunities using the limited resources available at smaller institutions. Recalling the town and gown partnerships that have long informed the mission of many small colleges, Martha Bárcenas-Mooradian reviews her efforts to enhance students’ study of medical Spanish through interactions with her school’s local Hispanic community. No less innovative, Amanda M. Caleb and Alicia H. Nordstrom share their work teaching a course on mental health that combines the study of English and psychology and empowers students as producers of knowledge through the production of a theatrical performance designed to draw attention to the experience of various mental health conditions. Along similar lines, Tina L. Hanlon and her colleagues discuss their efforts to create meaningful experiential learning opportunities by connecting students at their rural institution to a number of communities in the surrounding Appalachian region. Finally, Paola Prado and Autumn Quezada-Grant examine the ethics and challenges of creating sustainable and socially responsible interdisciplinary study-abroad opportunities.

While readers are encouraged to engage the collection through the lens of their own unique interests and institutional setting, two general observations, which appear throughout the volume, are worth noting at the outset. The first concerns the gap between faculty recognition of the value of interdisciplinarity in the classroom and institutional policies that delay or even discourage collaboration across the disciplines. Indeed, if institutions, large or small, are to meet the needs of an increasingly professional-minded student body destined for a lifetime of retraining, faculty and administrators must collaborate to develop hiring, promotion, workload, and compensation policies that not only enable but reward interdisciplinarity. Although such efforts demand a thorough, and challenging, review of much of what defines the academy for those employed in it, the essays in this volume demonstrate that progress is not only possible but under way. Fortunately, similar encouragement emerges with respect to a second observation that informs the collection. As many of the authors make clear, faculty understandings of and enthusiasm for interdisciplinarity are not always shared by students. While some students lack a basic appreciation for the disciplinary boundaries and methodologies that make interdisciplinarity possible, others have little interest in deviating from the major in which they enroll. Experienced in addressing both populations, the contributors provide a host of suggestions for instructors struggling to reconcile their own academic purposes with those of their students. Indeed, for the hope that it offers on these two important fronts alone, any reader interested in the future of the American academy will be well rewarded for joining the authors as they reflect on their work in synergistic classrooms throughout the land of