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MULTIDISCIPLINARY LEARNING TEAM TEACHING INITIATIVE

INITIATIVE

In order to prepare for a life of productive endeavor in the 21 st century, undergraduates at the University of Michigan must learn problem solving across disciplines and launch inquiries in uncharted territories of knowledge and practice. They must examine the assumptions that inhere in a disciplinary perspective and integrate material outside of patterns they are taught. They must locate issues within larger frameworks of thought, negotiate multiple perspectives, and develop habits of critical questioning and creative problem solving. And they must learn how to find their way through disconnected bodies of information and perspectives and create their own path to an education that coheres. We believe that the major problems of our time, from the environment to poverty, from human rights to terrorism, from religious movements to health care, cannot be studied effectively within any single discipline; all involve integrative thinking.

For the past four decades, national associations and task forces charged with improving the academy have issued myriad reports recommending that integrative learning be a key component of the undergraduate experience. As a result, interdisciplinary teaching has become a central part of curricular reform at institutions all across the country. Many liberal arts colleges feature comprehensive interdisciplinary courses and programs that give them a competitive edge in student recruitment. At research universities, it is harder to find good examples of the kind of interdisciplinary teaching that is so prevalent at smaller schools.

Currently, there are no University-wide programs to support development of large-scale team-teaching efforts or interdisciplinary degree programs for undergraduates. Such initiatives historically have often been driven by and supported on an ad hoc basis from a variety of provostial, school/college and external sources.

In Fall 2005, President Mary Sue Coleman dedicated $2.5 million dollars in funding to support team-teaching efforts and interdisciplinary degree programs at the undergraduate level. Over the next five years we aspire to support at least three initiatives that lead to new high enrollment courses or course sequences as well as three new cross-unit degree programs. In order to promote sustainability of the courses and programs, substantial support will be dedicated to develop course and degree programs followed by diminishing levels of support as the course or program is absorbed by a home department(s).