This paper describes a collaborative curriculum project integrating 4 leadership programs at three academic levels. What emerged from this effort was a theoretical model understood as a boundary object that allows our diverse perspectives a space within which we can communicate, collaborate, and learn from each other.

Researchers typically embark on interdisciplinarity after the acquisition of disciplinary expertise. This article explores the possibility of teaching interdiciplinarity to undergraduate students who have not yet mastered or are in the process of mastering a discipline or disciplines. It focuses on junior-year students in the Whittier Scholars…

Interdisciplinary undergraduate programs have grown dramatically in recent decades, but they are vulnerable to cuts given various stakeholders' calls for greater accountability in higher education. Assessing the outcomes of interdisciplinary majors presents an array of challenges, including how to describe and categorize patterned variation in the…

Curriculum mapping can be used to document, align, visualize, and assess curricular data, such as learning outcomes, assessment materials, instructional techniques, and student pre- and post-testing scores. A cross-disciplinary Curriculum Mapping Initiative currently underway at the University of Toronto Mississauga aims to: (1) develop guidelines…

A century ago, Abraham Flexner offered his perspective on the nascent field of social work, describing the field as educationally unfocused, too diversified in its practices, and too relational or assistive to other fields to meet the criteria for professional status. Using the example of the imperative to integrate information and communication…

Many disciplines share similar terminology for making: creating, composing, writing, and authoring. The last term authoring, however, is problematic in how it privileges an end goal of individual authority and reward. To interrogate this term, and argue for its importance in future collaborative, interdisciplinary work, this article examines a…

The future of faculty development rests, in part, on forming guided "communities of practice" to foster the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), which may enhance both scholarly productivity and pedagogical effectiveness. This article will discuss University of North Georgia's SoTL Academy, which bridges geographic and scheduling…

The Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM), University of Pennsylvania, was built in 1965 as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency's (ARPA) Interdisciplinary Laboratories (IDL) program intended to foster interdisciplinary research and training in materials science. The process that led to the construction of the…

This article utilizes one counselor education program's experience as a framework for exploring how to prepare counselors to work in interdisciplinary teams. Based on an interdisciplinary training program that involves faculty and graduate students from counseling, social work, nursing, internal medicine and family medicine, the article explores…

In 2008, the University of Melbourne rolled out its restructured undergraduate degree program offerings. Rather than offering a multitude of faculty-specific degrees, the University started to offer a limited number of generalist degrees that serve as developmental pathways to specialist masters programs as well as stand-alone employment…

Grounded as a self-study using arts-based inquiry to explore the experiences of six university faculty members participating in a cross-disciplinary faculty development program, the purpose of this paper is to (1) describe the Madison Research Fellows (MRF) program, and (2) explore the impact of the MRF program. Participating members included…

This paper discusses experiences and lessons learned from developing an interdisciplinary graduate program (IDP) during the last 10 y: The Howard University Graduate Program in Atmospheric Sciences (HUPAS). HUPAS is the first advanced degree program in the atmospheric sciences, or related fields such as meteorology and earth system sciences,…

This paper recommends that faculties of Social Work incorporate Disability Studies in their curriculum by embracing its interdisciplinary deconstructionist perspective. Disability Studies encourages Social Work to move beyond person-in--the-environment and anti-oppressive approaches to find more effective ways of removing barriers for persons with…

Malcolm Knowles' theory of andragogy is best known in the world of adult education as a conceptualization of how and why adults learn. The following practice-based article that has applied Knowles' theories and precepts to an undergraduate program reflects on how those concepts work with people whom Knowles might well have not considered "adults."…

The learner-centered paradigm of instruction differs in such fundamental ways from the teacher-centered paradigm that it requires technology to serve very different functions. In 2006, a research team at Indiana University began to work on identifying those functions and published their results in 2008. Subsequently, the team elaborated and…