Summary of Notes from the Integrated Studies Planning Retreat
September 19, 2005
Present: Jim Harnish, Edith Wollin, Jane Harradine, Karen Stuhldreher, Larry Hall, Jane Lister Reis, Ann Murkowski, Kalyn Owens
- What have we learned about integrated learning and where are we going?
The committee seminared on a reading by Veronica Boix Mansilla entitled “Assessing Student Work at Disciplinary Crossroads.” Her key points were that interdisciplinary work or understanding is:
- Disciplinary Grounded
- Contains Integrated Insights
- Has a clear sense of purpose, reflectivity, and self critique
Some of the quotes we examined from Boix Mansilla:
“Definition of “interdisciplinary understanding” is the capacity to integrate knowledge and modes of thinking drawn from two or more disciplines to produce a cognitive advancement – for example, explaining a phenomenon, solving a problem, creating a product, or raising a new question – in ways that would have been unlikely through single disciplinary means.”
“…interpreting the work with an epistemological eye. It involves weighing the affordances of one disciplinary perspective against those of another, and against the overall purpose of the student’s enterprise.”
“Disciplinary understanding then demands that students have a sense of the methods through which knowledge is developed and validated in a discipline…”
“But when probed to address the substance of their assessment – that is, the actual markers or characteristics of a good piece of interdisciplinary work – they expressed concern. Their shift to metaphoric language – “when the whole is more than the sum of the parts” or “when it all clicks together” – revealed their lack of a conceptual language to describe core qualities of sound interdisciplinary work.”
Question: Can cs faculty articulate their disciplines to students in a way that makes sense to them?
Edith: we tend to skip the discipline and skip the integration. We move too fast to focus on the interdisciplinary. It’s harder to focus on how to integrate the disciplines.
Students need interdisciplinary grounding in order to build an integrative “product” of knowledge.
Three core questions posed by Boix Mansilla:
- Is the work grounded in carefully selected and adequately employed disciplinary insights?
- Are the disciplinary insights clearly integrated so as to leverage student understanding (core questions)
- Does the work exhibit a clear sense of purpose, reflectively, and self critique?
Discussion:
A challenge is to pick out the key concepts and learning outcomes from each discipline as well as develop and propose integrative questions.
We need to know that our disciplines are codes of understanding and therefore be able to communicate these separate codes to students before asking them to integrate their knowledge.
Attitudes about learning will follow as we instill these disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices and methods.
Ownership and legitimacy happen when students are able to use correctly use disciplinary insights to formulate integrative insights.
Jim:
How do her insights inform our thinking about organizing the curriculum?
How do we identify student work that reflects these qualities of interdisciplinary thinking?
Karen: As we (IS committee) are getting more up to speed about what we’re doing then (learning more about what interdisciplinarity really means), we’ll be able to construct it in a classroom.
As we moved towards assessment, we realized that we realized that we didn’t have a good definition of interdisciplinarity. We had too much “common sense” rather than evidence of interdisciplinary thinking.
Interdisciplinarity requires that you first think from a disciplinary perspective. “…a concept of disciplinary understanding that highlights its multidimensionality and dynamism is in order” (Boix Mansilla).
Jim: we need to know the questions they are using at Project Zero (Harvard) to facilitate this process of learning and assessment.
Goal of the upcoming IS Program Review:
- raising faculty awareness (new learning for faculty) re assessment and definition of interdisciplinarity
- new research – producing insights from what we’re learning (SoTL project – see below)
- curriculum design that influenced by our new awarenesses
Larry Hall: We need to see other faculty’s good assignments. We benefit from what each other has learned in terms of teaching practices.
Jim: one idea would be to have faculty who are teaching fall quarter read the Boix Mansilla article and then come together to discuss their experiences in the classroom. Sort of like an SGID.
Suggestion: Formalize this process by creating a SoTL project: 1) read article 2) invite winter and spring IS faculty to discuss article and design their course based on Boix Mansilla’s ideas of format and assessment as well as Ruth Stiehls’ concept of design by outcomes 3) discuss assessmentassignments or projects that will show evidence of understanding 4) meet again to discuss the impact on IS program (Jane – will follow up on this suggestion)
2. Science Faculty Fishbowl (Suzanne Schlador, Ann Murkowski, Kalyn Owens, Tracy Furutani)
Suzanne: a challenge is finding a way to integrate the lab – time wise and space wise (cs have too many students to fit into one lab). It’s a logistics problem. We ended up splitting the group into two. But what happened is that as the science teacher, I had the better one and one with students. The first run through of the lab was different than the 2nd run through. I felt sometimes I was missing out what my colleagues were doing.
Ann: In spring, I didn’t want to miss seminaring so we got two lab rooms and hired a lab assistant. In the seminar, we all had similar skills.
Ann: I feel like my students learned about important things about the world, but they would fail Biology 100 if they were tested (like students who took it as a stand alone course).
Suzanne: I had to learn early on – pick out the key elements because you can’t cover it all. Try to fine tune it and hit key things. I’m not convinced that in a stand alone they would remember everything.
I also found it harder to free flow in the classroom conversations. Students liked how faculty wove their ideas. It was harder to weave content into conversations. The students resisted. This is an example of what Boix Mansilla talked about – students need discipline-based learning especially in the sciences.
Kalyn: could there be seminars designed to discuss content learning issues?
(Suzanne: time would be an issue, but it’s a good idea.)
Suzanne: science labs need to work or you lose students.
Ann: This is especially true for non science majors.
Suzanne: Designing labs created more work in coordinated studies courses.
Ann: we let our students form groups more naturally (in response to how did you form your lab groups?); we had too many other factors to worry about.
Ann: How do you think a science/science interface will work compared to a science/non-science coordinated studies course?
Suzanne: I think we will be able to accommodate more students by having two rooms next to each other. We will probably still have time issues. We’ll have to approach it more from discovery learning.
Ann: will you integrate seminaring?
Suzanne: we’ll have common readings, in-class activities that integrate learning; a common project, new labs
Ann: our biggest challenge was logistics. If I was teaching the coordinated studies course gain, I wish it was the only class I taught. It took so much of my time to design lab. I felt like I was back in school again as a liberal arts student.
Suzanne: sometimes students will discover a thread which will take the course a different way based on the different students who are there. Once they’re engaged and use that thread to further their learning.
Kalyn: it’s interesting that students find the thread. We were trying to find the threads ourselves.
Suzanne: Michael and Fran told me not to worry. They (students) will find the threads.
Marilyn: styles diverge (Humanities people are concerned with affective/cognitive); science faculty – here’s the course!)
Suzanne: I had concern about the seminars. We divided the class into thirds. I realized I’m one of the thirds!That was hardest thing for me. I felt as if I had missed the opportunity in college to develop that skill. I was terrified. I didn’t know if I was on right track. My team helped me by modeling seminar skills through fish bowl.
Stephanie: seminars are like science labs.
Jim: seminar is the signature pedagogy of liberal arts (Carnegie)
Karen: this conversation helps us. We’re like fish out of water in science labs.
Phebe: In the coordinated studies course that combined art and literature, I was working in drawing studio; it pushed me in ways that I experienced myself as a student too.
Karen: For students, it’s such a revelation to them that the teacher is learning.
Marilyn: Dario (student) said the single most important thing he learned at North was seeing teachers learn from each other.
Jim: students were discovering things that weren’t on the syllabus. This is an important thing to see. New learnings can emerge for both faculty and students. This is the powerful aspect of this pedagogy. It’s hard for faculty to admit they are new to a discipline.
Edith: definition of IS that we learned this morning is that you have to have the discipline first before we can integrate the disciplines. You can’t integrate what isn’t separate first.
Stephanie: key problem is time.
Terri: there are basic truths for each discipline
Tracy: labs are seminar of sciences. Without labs, students don’t have enough information in seminars to discuss science ideas. Michael and I actually added a lab to a non-lab science course to create this understanding for students.
Tracy: A key question in coordinated studies is which topics do we insert when and how much time to we dedicate to them?I think it’s easier when the topics are really dissimilar.
Suzanne: Another challenge is coordinated studies is the grading issue. I graded science labs; Michael graded seminar papers until the third time. When I grade my students work, it’s with a different eye.
Karen: Ann ended up with not an equitable load in our course. She graded her seminar paper as well as the labs. Finally she taught me how to grade the labs.
Suzanne: students loved to see Michael in the lab. When he was actively doing the lab, they were enthralled with his excitement.
Edith: This discussion brings up the issue of the lab and the size of class. It’s a good question to think about the best way to solve it.
Tracy: When Lynne and I agreed to do was to have the lab periods be separate. A group went one day of the week. I had other group at the same time and then we switched.
Edith: That’s what Suzanne spoke of earlier and she said that the students had different experiences.
Tracy: Another issue is the scheduling rooms which becomes a real challenge in coordinated studies.
Deborah Green: I’d rather start with what’s the common experience and then at a certain point back up to address the steps or the separate disciplines.
Deborah: academic disciplines are artificial constructs
Kalyn: how do you beyond contextualizing things?
Jim: We look at learning through our criteria base (discipline) to identify areas of learning. What more happens then within a specific discipline? Boix Mansilla talks about “levering” leaning. What kind of learning goes beyond a specific discipline basis. When we talk about not having enough time – not having enough time to do what?
Phebe: Tensions between content and process. How do you honor both without one leveling the other? How do we measure it?
Jim: how do we make visible their learning?
Phebe: and how can we demonstrate this learning for ourselves?
Tracy: I’m also concerned about students in terms of can they step into the next course in the sequence without having a huge learning void? The learning outcomes are different for lab based courses. This makes it hard to work with.
Karen: This is the same in Beginnings. Students have to have basic skills in Eng 101 so that they can be effective in Eng 102.
Phebe: good assignments are key.
Deborah: I think it would be ideal to teach the science courses in a whole year sequence in a cs model.
Kalyn: that’s certainly one of our goals.
Tracy:That’s a real challenge in a two-year system. Students leave or move to another school. It’s hard to keep continuity.
Laura: we talk a lot about cs how hard it is; we have this challenge and that challenge; and it will forever be difficult but it works. I don’t know if we’re ever going to solve these questions. There’s just something fantastic that happens when we have multiple teachers.
Phebe: Fundamentally one of the premises of cs is that we want students to look at the world differently. That’s the fundamental goal. IF that’s the case, then we’re always going to asking how to do this.
Stephanie: In coordinated studies, there’s a problem to be solved. There’s a question that we need to ask questions about it. Disciplines are a way to approach the world -- tools. When you use different tools thendifferent questions arise.
Jim: disciplines are tools, not ends unto themselves.
Phebe: having multiple disciplines allow students a way to see another set of questions -- another way of thinking. What happens when you take this and that and put them together?
Karen: What about if you take the metaphor of tools further. If you had multiple tools, you could “fix” more things. You need more than one tool to solve a problem
Suzanne: Another challenge is that I had students who didn’t sign up for the lab (didn’t pay lab fee) and so they didn’t want to write up a lab paper.
3. Brainstorming academic schedule for 06-07
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