Team-Teaching as a Promising Pathway toward Interdisciplinary Sustainability Competency Development

Abstract

Through a qualitative, interview-based inquiry on students’ learning in a single team-taught course focused on energy resources and policy implications, our team explored how team-taught interdisciplinary courses facilitate students’ development as leaders in energy resource sustainability. We conducted pre- and post-course interviews of nine undergraduate student participants and the two co-instructors for the course. The students self-identified as seven women and two men, ranging in age from 18 to 21 years. Six students were White, two were Asian/Asian American, and one was Black; the co-instructors were White men. To develop our findings, all interviews were subjected to a process of qualitative coding to derive themes, which we present with rich data from participants’ verbatim quotes. Findings revealed that constructivist-informed interdisciplinary instruction by the teaching team deepened students’ understandings of the importance of the knowledge of both energy science and policy, helping them to become holistically informed on critical issues in energy resource sustainability. Further, students recognized that an integrated understanding of these bodies of knowledge was critical to writing energy resource policy memos that constituted the central learning/assessment activity of the course. The kind of literacy afforded to the students through the team-teaching endeavor is foundational to students’ development as climate leaders. We suggest that this mode of teaching may represent an effective teaching enhancement for preparing energy sustainability and climate change leaders at the University of Michigan, other US institutions and internationally.