“Developing Curriculum for a Multi-Course Interdepartmental Learning Community to Promote Retention and Learning for Underprepared Engineering Students”
by Rachel A. Milloy, Matthew Moberly, and Rebecca Powell | Xchanges 9.1
The ILC: Interdisciplinary Collaboration (cont.)
Because both English 111 and SMET 101 share values of active learning, peer collaboration, and disciplinary exploration, the curriculum bridge we built between these two courses emerged naturally. We discovered that many of our writing assignments could be modified to include engineering subject matter without compromising the writing skills students were required to develop in English 111. Working collaboratively with our SMET 101 colleague, we revised several assignments to address objectives from both courses.
Before discussing our curriculum design decisions and how they played out in the classroom, it is important to understand the ILC structure. In the ILC, students take all four courses with the same cohort of peers — the same 25 to 30 students sit in all four classes together. This cohort structure means that students have a built-in support system. Students in the ILC know their peers well by the second week of school, which we found allowed for more risk-taking in the classroom and more honest, productive peer review sessions. Additionally, the ILC instructors worked to reinforce a sense of community in each class by regularly referring to the work being done in other courses and by communicating to students that the four courses are interconnected and mutually supportive.
Our collaboration as ILC instructors was formal and consistent. We met bi-weekly with the ILC coordinator and with the other instructors in the program. In these meetings, we shared syllabi and discussed our assignments, calibrating our courses so that they would build on rather than conflict with each other. We collaborated on projects, shared writing samples, and worked out logistics for assignments that crossed course lines. We also communicated informally, trading observations about specific students’ progress and challenges.
As instructors newly committed to interdisciplinary collaboration, we also faced the challenge of learning from disciplines not our own. None of us had extensive knowledge of engineering, yet we were expected to teach in context and to build assignments around engineering problems. We met this challenge by reading engineering texts, consulting with our SMET 101 colleague, and by putting ourselves in the position of learners — willing to ask basic questions and to acknowledge what we didn’t know. This experience taught us a great deal about what it means to learn in a new discipline.