The Teaching Squares Program involves the formation of a three or four member group of educators from different departments or disciplines. The diversity in knowledge and experience helps to promote cross-disciplinary learning and professional growth among teachers. Once the group has been formed, the teachers select a class they will each teach…

While campus activism dates back decades, today's community colleges are generating additional dialogue via interdisciplinary arts programming. This article highlights various art programs throughout the United States, including a multidisciplinary video for suicide awareness, a mural that is represented of the school's diversity, and a poetry…

How can two-year colleges ensure that all students can access quality career navigation opportunities that inform their studies and position them for meaningful, family-sustaining work? That is the challenge being addressed at Boston's Bunker Hill Community College through a college-wide initiative known as Ethnographies of Work (EoW). The…

An academic career at a community college is in a number of ways quite different from a career at a four-year university. From the emphasis on teaching and pedagogy to the absence of the "publish or perish" imperative (at least in most parts of the country), community college professors often navigate an array of challenges different…

Maintaining an active research agenda while teaching full-time at a community college can be daunting, but with institutional support for scholarly research by way of course release it is possible. This personal reflection offers up evidence of institutional support from a variety of sources within the public university system of New York City,…

Microplastic contamination of the environment is a major concern but detecting such contamination presents a challenge, particularly for particles <0.1 mm in size. Community scientists and students who participated in a plankton monitoring program and routinely examined samples of seawater using brightfield microscopy, often found fragments and…

Systems thinking, interdisciplinary research projects, and creative problem solving are ways to frame modern chemistry curricula to inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, teachers, and citizens to use their skills and education to create a sustainable future. By integrating planetary boundaries, green chemistry, and the UN…

Community colleges nationwide are retrofitting their campuses to meet best environmental principles, creating comprehensive "living laboratories" where participants have a direct impact on reducing an institution's carbon footprint. Environmental stewardship is a growing priority among millennials, observers say. Sixty-six percent of…

This article explores the design and implementation of the curriculum for City Seminar, an integrated course in the first-year experience at a new community college. This interdisciplinary course focuses on a critical issue that provides content and context for quantitative reasoning (QR), reading, and writing (RW) to strengthen students'…

Students often enter community college with little proficiency in writing. The authors of this paper share a series of writing assignments designed to help students develop writing and critical thinking abilities throughout their community college experience. The first is a series of relatively low-stakes exercises aimed at helping beginning…

This brief examines the continued underrepresentation of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields; explains the benefits of collaboration around broadening participation; and offers guidance on building partnerships as a strategy…

Medieval Day at Reynolds turned a typical Friday class day into an interdisciplinary learning event, which joined faculty and students into a community of learners. From classrooms issued tales of Viking and Mongol conquests, religious crusaders, deadly plague, and majestic cathedrals and art, all told by costumed faculty members with expertise in…

An investigation of the possibility of life in the universe, or astrobiology, is an ideal topic for an interdisciplinary seminar course. Answering the topic's inherent questions--whether life exists elsewhere in the universe and, if it does indeed exist, whether we on Earth could contact such life--requires an interdisciplinary approach and…

What does interdisciplinary integration actually look like for students beginning their college studies? This article describes what a LaGuardia Community College teaching team, who typically share a theme and consult periodically but keep their classes distinct--discovered when they designed an integrative assignment for a paired developmental…

Interdisciplinary field study courses at 2-year colleges can provide an opportunity to enhance student learning. The authors present here an 11-day interdisciplinary field-study course designed for nonscience majors at a 2-year college. Using a theoretical learning framework that emphasizes cognitive and metacognitive gains, the field study…