Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the current context of social work as a profession and some of the major transition factors that are affecting social workers and social work organisations. Design/methodology/approach: The paper first explores what social work is, and how it has developed as a profession. It reflects on social…

Teaching economics to elementary aged children can be a challenge for classroom teachers. Using popular children's literature is an engaging and fun way to involve students in learning important economic lessons while integrating the content with language arts standards. This article will describe how to use children's books to teach economic…

This article is about Complex Problem Solving (CPS), its history in a variety of research domains (e.g., human problem solving, expertise, decision making, and intelligence), a formal definition and a process theory of CPS applicable to the interdisciplinary field. CPS is portrayed as (a) knowledge acquisition and (b) knowledge application…

The tongue of a tube-lipped nectar bat is 8.6 cm long and its body length is only 5.8 cm and its tongue has to be stored inside its ribcage because it is 150% longer than its whole body. Looking at the tube-lipped nectar bat alone, various areas of the mathematics curriculum can be covered, with multiple opportunities for investigations and using…

This dissertation provides interdisciplinary insights into the role of client's internal collaborative experience in managing communication during a complex outsourced project, building a quality client-vendor relationship and ultimately achieving success in the project. Each of the three studies in this dissertation identifies a gap in…

Governments in all Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries are facing the challenge of governing increasingly complex education systems. There is a growing need for governance structures that can handle this complexity and which can provide actors with the knowledge they need to make decisions. This working paper…

No one doubts that globalization is one of the most important trends of today. As American universities expand their global footprint with branch campuses in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere, many faculty are concerned about oppressive governance, human-rights violations, and lack of academic freedom abroad. Meanwhile administrators grapple…

Current cutting-edge biomedical investigation requires that the researcher have an operational understanding of several diverse disciplines. Biocatalysis is a field of science that operates at the crossroads of organic chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, and molecular biology, and provides an excellent model for interdisciplinary research. We…

In its 10th anniversary issue, "The Chronicle Review" asked a number of scholars to identify the "Defining Idea of the Next Decade." One nominee: the movement to abandon the disciplines in order "to meet the scholarly and public challenges educators face" (Ecklund, 2010). In Elaine Ecklund's perspective, it is only through interdisciplinary…

A new undergraduate program in chemical biology was launched in 2008 to provide a unique learning experience for those students interested in this interdisciplinary science. An innovative undergraduate chemical biology laboratory course at the third-year level was developed as a key component of the curriculum. The laboratory course introduces…

The Common Core State Standards are driving the profession toward more cross-disciplinary teaching. The standards themselves address the what of curriculum rather than the how, but they do offer text exemplars for different grade levels. While some find the exemplars too difficult, others see them as worthwhile texts that, with a teacher's…

Many findings from research as well as reports from teachers describe students' problem solving strategies as manipulation of formulas by rote. The resulting dissatisfaction with quantitative physical textbook problems seems to influence the attitude towards the role of mathematics in physics education in general. Mathematics is often seen as a…

Objective: The authors describe an interdisciplinary training experience developed for psychiatry residents and seminary students that assessed each group's beliefs and attitudes toward the other's profession. The training was designed to enhance awareness, positive attitudes, and interaction between the disciplines. Methods: From 2005 to 2008,…

Educators and policy makers have advocated for reform of undergraduate biology education, calling for greater integration of mathematics and physics in the biology curriculum. While these calls reflect the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of biology research, crossing disciplinary boundaries in the classroom carries epistemological challenges…

The role of peers in U.S. doctoral education is a topic that has been minimally researched and has received only passing attention. Yet peers are an important part of every doctoral learning community. One possible explanation for the lack of attention given to peers in doctoral education is that pedagogically, doctoral education is generally…