Frequently Asked Questions for Faculty  

Why Participate in BCC’s Interdisciplinary Studies Program? *

Interdisciplinary studies classes allow you to be a teacher, co-investigator and learner simultaneously. You can explore “big picture” topics that not only draw on your own expertise, but also incite your curiosity, interests and commitments. IDS classes allow the luxury of time to explore topics in-depth and to use the community as an expansion of your classroom. They offer opportunities to expand your repertoire of teaching approaches and acquire new scholarly interests. You can build mentoring relationships with other faculty as well as with students.

What are the benefits for students?

With an emphasis on interpersonal dialogue, collaboration, and experiential learning within the context of diversity, these classes counteract a decreasing sense of community and connection and allow students to relate their college-level learning to larger personal and global questions. IDS classes offer more coherent opportunities for the teaching of literacy skills, such as reading, writing, and speaking, and a robust way to address interdisciplinary ideas. In a variety of institutional settings and in a number of forms, learning communities have been shown to increase student retention and academic achievement, increase student involvement and motivation, improve students’ time to degree completion, and enhance student intellectual development. Students involved in learning communities become more intellectually mature and responsible for their own learning and develop the capacity to care about the learning of their peers.

How are IDS classes taught?

Ideally, IDS classes foster learning to learn as a social act. Students bring the confidence and social energy fostered by membership in the community into the classroom. Faculty can incorporate that sense of membership into their teaching. Learning communities should also involve reading and critical discourse about the issues of a diverse society, leading to actual participation in the larger community.

Strategies for building active learning in the classroom include:

• Service learning is the growing use in college courses of a combination of community service and opportunities for reflection on the learning that occurs through that service. Service opportunities are carefully selected to align with the learning goals of the course or learning community experience.
• Collaborative and cooperative learning provide teams of students the opportunity to learn actively, through shared discovery of knowledge. Collaborative learning allows students to create new knowledge together, while students involved in cooperative learning search together for pre-set "right" answers to problems or questions.
• Peer teaching is the increasingly popular practice of employing undergraduate students to serve as co-instructors with faculty members. Peer teachers are assigned to serve as mentors, tutors, and/or intellectual and social supports for students in learning community courses, often in first-year seminars.
• Discussion groups and seminars are generally used in learning communities throughout a term as opportunities for faculty and students to integrate concepts introduced in their learning community courses. Groups may, or may not be offered for academic credit, while seminars generally carry at least one hour of credit. These discussion groups and seminars offer a particularly useful block of time in which to share experiences at interdisciplinary events on and off-campus. They are generally followed by an opportunity to reflect and write on the learning that occurred and its relationship to the concepts introduced in the learning communities.
• Experiential learning is any of a variety of approaches for allowing students opportunities outside the classroom to enact the concepts learned through in-class discussions, reading, writing, or other activities. Experiential learning includes activities such as service learning, study abroad, community service, and internships and are intentionally linked to the academic goals of a course or cluster of courses.
• Labs and field trips offer additional methods for allowing students to enact the intellectual concepts learned in class. Labs can be used as the arena for conversations about implications of concepts learned in linked course/s. Field trips are less complex, costly, and difficult to integrate than other experiential learning experiences, while still providing some up close exposure to intellectual concepts in action.
• Problem-based learning allows students to work through real or simulated issues related to the learning goals of a course to strengthen their ability to collect and analyze data about those issues, propose alternatives, and arrive at solutions. Problem-based learning underscores the trans-disciplinary nature of most problems and is often employed in conjunction with group learning.
• Demonstrations are delivered by students, peer or primary instructors, or guest presenters to bring to life concepts learned in the course or learning community. Ideally, as with problem-based learning, demonstrations highlight the trans-disciplinary action or thinking inherent in most situations.
• Writing and speaking across-the-curriculum are fundamental components of most learning communities because these interdisciplinary experiences allow instructors to demonstrate the critical nature of communication skills across courses and situations outside the academic experience. Learning communities, particularly for first-year students, are writing and/or speaking intensive in keeping with the primary goals of most undergraduate curricula.
• Ongoing reflection is an essential component of most successful learning communities because these experiences allow the time, space, instruction, and encouragement students often need to examine what they have learned, how they have learned it, and how that learning might be applied in other situations. Reflective learners who are consciously able to draw on past experiences are more efficient, confident, and effective learners.
• Metacognitive activities combine the thoughtful self-evaluation of reflective learning with active learning approaches, such as service learning, study abroad, or internships. Metacognition allows students to examine what they have learned and to draw inferences about that learning's applications elsewhere. Metacognitive activities are experiential opportunities to bring students to this adaptive mode of thinking.
• Self-evaluation places the onus for determining levels of success or failure in a particular activity on the student engagement in that activity. Self-evaluation activities can be as simple as a one-minute paper that asks, "what worked, what didn't, what next" to a multi-term student-created electronic portfolio that houses academic work selected by the student for its demonstration of learning over time.

How do I get started?

BCC has an annual application cycle for the review and approval of interdisciplinary classes. A call for applications goes out to faculty each fall quarter. It requests proposals for classes to be offered in the following academic year. (See the sample application packet available on this website.) Applications are due in the beginning of winter quarter. Throughout the year, the Center for Liberal Arts offers course design help and guidance to faculty on an individual or group basis. The Center can help you find teaching partners, flesh out ideas into full proposals, develop course outcomes or incorporate strategies for student civic engagement. The Center also offers workshops and training sessions from time to time. For further information or to make an appointment, please contact Diane Douglas at ddouglas@bcc.ctc.edu or 425.564.2550.

* Much of this material comes from the Learning Communities website of the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education - See: http://learningcommons.evergreen.edu/03_start_entry.asp