This chapter will discuss global awareness in five distinctive disciplines (Communications, Literature, Mathematics, Social Work, and Sociology). Comparisons between the pedagogies in the disciplines focus on academic settings other than study abroad.

Access to higher education continues to expand in the United States. And, as opportunity has continued to increase, so too has the amount of diversity present throughout higher education. These trends, combined with the fundamental principles connected to the purpose of higher education, work to create culturally relevant and responsive practice.…

Inquiry-guided learning (IGL) has widespread appeal in higher education as a suite of teaching strategies that promotes learning through students' increasingly independent investigation of questions, problems, and issues using the methods of inquiry of the disciplines. Framed as especially appropriate for research universities, IGL has been…

This chapter reveals how thoughtful course redesign that specifically addresses the physical environment of a learning space can significantly improve student learning.

Faculty in higher education may find themselves reading student work or hearing students' voices in class or in online course discussion boards that reveal a lot of personal information, information that they think might be better kept private, information that may be concerning or even threatening. In their attempts to create richer learning…

In this article, the authors explain their understanding of internationalization of the curriculum (and some implications for higher education), and discuss how they identified a particular educational development approach that they believe is very effective in the advancement of an internationalized curriculum. The authors then describe the…

The higher education literature abounds with reports and studies calling for reform in undergraduate education. An alphabet soup of higher education associations creates or advocates desired learning outcomes for postsecondary education and endorses approaches for student learning. This article shows connections between some of the major…

Strategies for locating interdisciplinary knowledge and information for development of college curricula and instruction are outlined, including identification of existing curriculum models and syllabi (through publications, networking, and online searching) and finding literature on the concept of interdisciplinarity in the humanities, social…

Introducing cultural diversity into the core curriculum need not be political. Traditional departmental structures could be reconfigured to incorporate third world studies at the introductory level and within the scope of traditional core courses. Interweaving non-Western studies with existing curricula is preferable to putting them in courses by…

Faculty need to be supported and encouraged to integrate disciplinary research and scholarship into undergraduate courses and programs in ways that are beneficial to their students' learning. (Contains 1 figure.)

Across the country, college faculty are redefining core knowledge and skills to include learning about pluralism in the United States and about world cultures. They are experimenting with new pedagogical approaches that engage cultural diversity in effective ways. Interdisciplinary collaboration, thematic curricula, and cooperative learning…

Principles for the administration and governance of interdisciplinary programs are drawn from several decades of experience in general education and in interdisciplinary centers, colleges, and schools. The principles are discussed in terms of the institutional context and include suggestions for garnering budgetary support, addressing faculty…

Teaching the large introductory science course is a challenge, but when the objective is seen not as covering the field but uncovering part of it to illustrate principles common to the whole, the facts are no longer the end result but tools with which the disciplines can be further explored. (Author/MSE)

When the introductory philosophy course evokes cognitive dissonance over philsophical problems in which students are already interested, it can help develop students' skills in reasoning and assessing arguments. This kind of course should play a key role in the undergraduate curriculum. (MSE)

A study investigated whether Biglan clusters of academic disciplines (hard/soft, pure/applied, life/nonlife) could be used to explain disciplinary differences in college student ratings of instruction. It was found that Biglan clusters do not explain the differences, many disciplines still emphasize knowledge acquisition over higher-order skills,…