This project produced an online astronomy course based on the free, online OpenStax textbook. When this project was conceived, about a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors had no idea that in a short period of time, most college and university classes would be online. This abrupt change in modalities of courses, from traditional,…

The colleges and universities in Taiwan are confronted with the following two problems: (1) The average youth (aged 15-29) unemployment rate is more than double the overall unemployment rate; and (2) Mainly affected by the low birth rate, the admission and vacancy rates of colleges and universities have increased, and fierce competition exists…

Various experts and institutions, including the United Nations, have stressed the complexity of the 21st century's global sustainability challenges. Higher education institutions should be at the center of research and education to meet these challenges. However, these institutions also find themselves in crisis, in part due to the economic…

The need that emerged in Development Studies to trespass across disciplinary boundaries is discussed. An interdisciplinary characterization of Human Sustainable Development is sketched. Some attempts at the University of the Republic in Uruguay to foster related work that connects sciences and natural sciences are briefly described. This work…

For over 3 years, 6 faculty members and 1 graduate student have gathered as a working group applying an interdisciplinary focus to public engagement projects involving immigrant families in the rural Midwest. One dimension of the group's effort has been to involve faculty, staff, and students from many disciplines in its examination of pertinent…

What happens when you take 15 years of teaching and leading at four different fairly traditional, fairly engaging, high-performing secondary schools, add 3 years of innovation incubation as part of the establishment senior leadership team at Hobsonville Point Secondary School, and throw in a bit of "Most Likely to Succeed" (the…

In the ten years since the Modern Language Association published their report, "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" (2007) dissatisfaction with the "two-tiered configuration" of US foreign language departments has become increasingly vocal. While the target of the criticism is often the…

This paper builds upon Perna's college choice model by integrating Anzaldúa's theory of "conocimiento" to propose an interdisciplinary college choice framework for Latinx students. Using previous literature, this paper proposes college-"conocimiento" as a framework that contextualizes Latinx student college choices within the…

The University of Southern Maine (USM) designed and implemented an internal Research Cluster Seed Fund competition with the goals of building USM faculty expertise to address industry and community needs, deepening the impact of research through an interdisciplinary approach to solving problems, and leveraging external funding to sustain…

The underlying rationale to support interdisciplinary collaboration in geriatrics and gerontology is based on the complexity of elderly care. The most important characteristic about interdisciplinary health care teams for older people in Latin America is their subjective-basis framework. In other regions, teams are organized according to a…

Given the academic specialization endemic today in humanities disciplines, some of the most important work of humanities centers has become promoting education about the humanities in general. After charting the rise of humanities centers in the US, three characteristics of centers that enable their advancement of larger concerns of the humanities…

Early status reports on WAC call for engagement with the disciplines, robust research about writing, and a transformation from missionary work to a more wide-ranging model. A Taxonomy of WAC describes common characteristics of WAC programs as well as organizing those characteristics into a progression from initiation to change agency. (Contains 1…

This essay contends that engagement, a productive coupling of the academy's intellectual resources with the enterprise of generating solutions to current real-world challenges, can best flourish when its theoretical foundations rest upon rhetorical perspectivism. We examine the current movement in academe toward engagement and problems attendant…

The manuscript outlines the impact that our National Science Foundation Interdisciplinary Training for Undergraduates in Biological and Mathematical Sciences program, BioMaPS, has had on the students and faculty at Murray State University. This interdisciplinary program teams mathematics and biology undergraduate students with mathematics and…

"Finding True North" tells the story of two remarkable schools in Rochester, New York. World of Inquiry School 58 and Genesee Community Charter School are successful on every traditional measure, with some of the highest test scores in New York State, and a host of awards and honors between them. What's different about these schools,…