This program provides stipends for those interested in teaching an undergraduate interdisciplinary course involving team teaching across departmental boundaries. This program is designed to help UM faculty eager to bring emerging fields of knowledge into the undergraduate learning experience. Exciting new terrains often straddle disciplines and invite new intellectual collaborations, yet faculty face important challenges in the planning and development of collaborative, border-crossing teaching.
Interdisciplinary teaching requires fresh thinking and new approaches.
This program will provide a supportive structure for meeting the challenges and will allow participating faculty the opportunity to exchange ideas and learn from one another. Each team will be responsible for creating a course portfolio. The portfolios will include course goals, a chronicle of their implementation, and documentation of both faculty and student learning. The course portfolios will provide evidence of the extent to which interdisciplinary courses have been good learning experiences for faculty and students and, therefore, merit institutional support. The interdisciplinary teams will meet together in the summer months before the academic year begins in order to start course planning and hear about other teams' ideas as they plan.