Teaching across boundaries: Examining the institutional process of establishing multidisciplinary courses

Abstract

Many of the decisions educators make are under direct influence of institutional structure, notably those that seek to create multidisciplinary spaces for students. Some multidisciplinary courses are developed in isolation even though they are intended to combine and integrate disciplines. This study seeks to explore how such multidisciplinary courses are established -the process that educators undergo to design and implement these courses, both formal and informal. We aim at utilizing social network analysis to identify and communicate the connections between educators and their multidisciplinary courses such that future courses can be developed more strategically. We have mapped the formal structure of the College of Engineering at Southeast R1 University using social network analysis and created networks representing the faculty involved in co-taught courses. To supplement the publicly available data, we conducted semi-structured interviews with faculty affiliated with a broad sample of the multidisciplinary courses. Our analysis compared the themes that emerged from interviews against those from the social network analysis. These analyses enabled us to identify instances of alignment and divergence between what was shown in the institutional data and what was perceived and explained by faculty directly involved with disciplinary courses. Findings of this work can serve departments and educators by acting as a feedback loop in providing new avenues for creating and implementing multidisciplinary courses by utilizing existing multidisciplinary connections.