For the past nine years, we have been offering an interdisciplinary course for science majors: The Biology and Chemistry of Brewing. This course is primarily laboratory- and inquiry-based; from a total of 24 h of student/instructor contact time, approximately 6 h are devoted to lecture, and the other 18 h are divided between laboratory exercises,…

The purpose of a general education program is to produce generally well-educated adults who can function as informed citizens and engage in the popular intellectual debates of their time. The skills and frames of reference that are necessary for thoughtful, independent opinions are themselves the objects of debate, but there are points of…

'Research and teaching' is a typical response to the question, 'What are universities for?' For most people, one comes to mind more quickly than the other. Most undergraduate students will think of teaching, while PhD students will think of research. University staff will have similarly varied reactions depending on their roles. Emphasis on one or…

This article qualitatively explores the potential of entrepreneurial leadership curricula to encourage interdisciplinary interest in agricultural issues and prompt diverse student engagement in agricultural leadership and innovation. The study focuses specifically on the activities and perspectives of 15 undergraduate students who completed an…

Purpose: Delivery of sustainability-related curriculum to undergraduate students can be problematic due to the traditional "siloing" of curriculum by faculties along disciplinary lines. In addition, while there is often a ready availability of courses focused on sustainability issues in the later years of students' programs, few early…

Background: This study presents two teacher design teams (TDTs) during a professional development experience centered on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-integrated curriculum development. The main activity of the study, curriculum design, was framed as a design problem in order to better understand how teachers engaged…

Given that few studies have formally examined pedagogical design considerations of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), this study explored variations in the pedagogical design of six MOOCs offered at the University of Toronto, while considering disciplinary characteristics and expectations of each MOOC. Using a framework (Neumann et al., 2002)…

Inspired by the news that Bristol had become the UK's first Green Capital, Kate Hawkey, Jon James and Celia Tidmarsh set out to explore what a "Green Capital" School Curriculum might look like. Hawkey, James and Tidmarsh explain how they created a cross-curricular project to deliver in-school workshops focused on the teaching of climate…

This research is a synthesis of studies carried out in 18 countries to identify contributions of education for sustainable development (ESD) to quality education. Five common questions were used for the interviews in each country to solicit education leaders and practitioners' views on the outcome and implementation of ESD. The analysis revealed…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the processes utilised to develop an online learning module within the Opening Real Science (ORS) project--"Modelling the present: Predicting the future." The module was realised through an interdisciplinary collaboration, among mathematicians, scientists and mathematics and science educators that…

Although interdisciplinary approaches to education are found throughout the West, interdisciplinarity is not everywhere conceived and implemented the same way. Adopting a socio-historical perspective, this article presents two conceptions of interdisciplinarity in primary and middle school education (though the conceptions are apparent at other…

The Department of Chemistry at American University has replaced its junior- and senior-level laboratory curriculum with two, two-semester long, student-led research projects as part of the department's American Chemical Society-accredited program. In the first semester of each sequence, a faculty instructor leads the students through a set of…

It is within the overlap of three gaps in the literature on feminist classrooms (lack of initiation, student representation, and evaluation) that the authors situate this paper. In conceptualizing this paper, they wanted not only to describe a context from which others can consider their own present or future offerings of feminist,…

The move on decentralization of curriculum development in recent decade has become one of the major tasks in developing scientific fields in Iran. By implementing these programs some drawbacks have become evident. The objective of this study was to identify and assess the existing challenges involved in the development of academic disciplines from…

The addition of the arts to STEM education, now known as STEAM, adds a new dimension to problem-solving within those fields, offering students tools such as imagination and resourcefulness to incorporate into their designs. However, the shift from STEM to STEAM has changed what it means for students to learn within and across these disciplines.…