Creative innovation takes a (team-teaching) family

Abstract

Team teaching can be a valuable means of enabling cross-disciplinary collaboration, interdisciplinary study, and pedagogical innovation, but the logistical and intellectual challenges can seem too daunting to overcome. Here, we share the story of how four faculty members from professional writing, communications, and computing sciences developed a team teaching "family" as we imagined, created, launched, and ran an innovative experiential learning program at our university. The Design Thinking Studio in Social Innovation is a semester-long program worth four full courses of credit that brought us together with 14 students from disciplines across the university to learn and apply design thinking and social innovation theories to a large-scale civic engagement project. Here we explore the lived experience of the faculty during the pilot semester and how our team-teaching family was crucial to our personal and professional success supporting our "kids" in this high-stress environment. We then offer tips for creating your own team-teaching family.