Two Sides of the Same Coin: Engaging Students beyond the Traditional Classroom.

Carolyn Haynes is a faculty member at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Peter Sands is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Interview with Dr. Carolyn Haynes Berg: Dr. Haynes, I would like to do is start out with an easy question. How do students learn best? Haynes: Well, in my view, students learn best by having their own knowledge and experience valued. With teacher helping them to link that knowledge and experience to existing knowledge that the teacher has and by helping them to reconstruct what they already know, they can make that link from past experience and knowledge to new ideas. Berg: How does moving outside the traditional classroom help them learn better? Haynes: Interdisciplinary teaching focuses primarily on larger, real-world problems and issues that can't be addressed by any one single discipline. As a result, those kinds of problems and issues are often more relevant to students' lives, so they're more motivated, I think, to learn, to find evidence, data and knowledge that will help them solve whatever that issue or problem is at hand. Berg: Can you give an example of how that could work? Haynes: A course that would address issues of, say, terrorism today is one example. When looking solely from a sociological perspective, you wouldn't get at all of the reasons, causes or solutions. You would need to bring political science to bear, psychology, maybe cultural studies or anthropology to gain a more cultural understanding of the topic. By doing that, you have a richer knowledge of view, a comprehensive perspective on the problem at hand. Berg: That begs the question, can't a person do interdisciplinary teaching as an individual teacher in a classroom? Haynes: Actually, you can, but I think one of the keys to interdisciplinary teaching is really having in depth understanding of the discipline. By having a variety of teachers with history and background in one disciplinary field, you'll end up having a better perspective on the topic. That does not mean that one person cannot teach an interdisciplinary course; I just think the most ideal structure is a team taught one. When I've taught interdisciplinary courses by myself, I had to go out and seek the expertise, advice and guidance of people in other disciplines with which I'm not familiar, or bring in guest speakers or have students go out and interview experts in a variety of disciplines so they can really bring those to bear. One of the attacks on interdisciplinary education is that it tends to be superficial, that you don't really delve into the disciplinary knowledge bases as much as you could. So, to counter that, you really do have to have credible expertise available for the students, either through the instructors or through some other means, to help them get the best knowledge at hand to work toward understanding whatever the topic is. Berg: As an instructor who wants to teach an interdisciplinary class, what kind of skills does a person need to effectively teach in that situation? Haynes: Well, my view is that you need a broad education and a wide-spanning intellectual curiosity, an ability to be a perpetual learner. I think most interdisciplinary teachers are not as concerned with presenting students with a large content base, but rather to help students through an interdisciplinary process. You need to be familiar with ways of going about interdisciplinary learning- drawing on disciplines, finding common ground, helping students find ways to integrate knowledge, to compare and contrast critically the disciplinary knowledge at hand. And I think you have to be really comfortable with ambiguity because you're always going to be moving into territory with which you may not be totally familiar. You have to model good skills of investigation and inquiry for your students because you're not going to know all the answers at any given time. …