Enhancing Interdisciplinary Thinking, Teamwork and Collaboration across CM, Arch and CE Disciplines

To enhance interdisciplinary thinking and learn how to collaborate with other disciplines, design-build classes are often offered to a student audience that includes construction management students as well as students from design disciplines. The authors designed and delivered a design-build course with students from three programs: Construction Management (CM), Architecture (Arch) and Civil Engineering (CE). As part of this course, three teams of students at our university competed to submit a design-build proposal for the delivery of a computer lab facility to be built in Kenya by civil engineering students enrolled at a partner university jointly with the local community. The proposed approach aimed at achieving an enhancement of interdisciplinary thinking, teamwork and collaboration across CM, Arch and CE disciplines while delivering a set of design alternatives for our partner and client in Kenya. This paper describes how the instructors designed this pilot offering. Then, information on student learning outcomes as well as a set of instructors’ lessons learned is provided. Last, a framework for developing an elective course around this pilot offering is presented to show that this approach for augmenting interdisciplinary studies could be replicated in different ways by other ASC programs.