The Corporate Model for Interdisciplinary Teaching

I'm a member of the Teacher's Guild, and last week I shared some work that a few of my colleagues and I are doing to build an interdisciplinary unit centered around redesigning bicycles.  Our goal was to facilitate collaboration between different classes with few overlapping students.  The solution we're in the process of rolling out right now is a project-centered collaboration, where students in different classes contribute to design ideas that live in design briefs that travel from class to class.

Here's the flyby concept: Students in an engineering class used research and interviews to identify the biggest areas of improvement in bicycle design.  They worked up some prototype proposals for these improvements - ideas ranged from incorporating pneumatic suspensions into the seat post to modifying the tire tread to model the frictional properties of shark skin.  Then they sent their proposals along to students in my AP Physics class, who designed experiments to yield data on the value and functionality the engineering students' designs.  They passed their collected data along to an Algebra 2 class that did the number crunching for the experimental data, at which point the conclusions were sent back for the consideration of the engineering class, who is currently considering a second design iteration informed by the data.  In my vision, the student collaboration functions similarly to the collaboration that occurs between the departments of a corporation; the engineering students are Designers, AP Physics represents R&D, and the Algebra students are Data Analytics.

So far, the process had yielded both excitement and frustration for the students involved as they grapple both with the class content underlying their contributions to the project, as well as learning to communicate and collaborate with students in other classes through a variety of media (emails, technical documents, and in-person discussions).

There are certainly some tweaks that we'll make in future versions of the project, but I'm super excited about the general method, and I think it could be generalized to include nearly any combination of courses.  I present here a brief run-down of the major design considerations that went into (or perhaps should go into a future version of) our project design that could potentially be generalized:

1. Decide which courses and instructors will participate in your interdisciplinary project, then search for broad areas that could potentially provide areas of overlap.  All of our collaborating courses were STEM, so focusing on re-working the technical details of something like a bicycle was a natural fit.  However, I think that it wouldn't have been much of a stretch to include other courses as well; for instance, art students could work on visual/aesthetic design aspects.  Environmental Science students can prepare environmental impact statements to compliment bicycle designs, and so on.
2. Identify a course that can drive the initial launch of the project with design thinking.  Whatever your ideas is, designing your unit so that it originates from student curiosity and interacting with real, compelling issues are big factors in student buy-in.  If answering this question is confusing to you, think about it through the following lens: if you imagine your collaborating courses as departments in a corporation, what is the product or service that your corporation provides?  Who is its customer?  Which department will have the most direct interaction with the customer?  Whichever department is most responsible for understanding the needs of the user being served by your project (even if you don't literally intend to deliver your project to a user) is probably the most logical choice.  The project is like a baton that is passed from class to class.  You just need to identify who starts with the baton.
3. Consider if other complimentary opportunities for collaboration exist that can supplement the primary project.  For instance, our AP physics and Algebra Two classes will work together on three additional labs over the course of the semester.  These are labs I do every year, slightly re-framed to help the AP students learn the underlying physics while working through the lens of bicycle mechanics.  While working on force, energy, and rotational dynamics, physics and math students work together on experiment design, data collection, analysis, and forming conclusions.  We chose to incorporate these additional elements because
1. it primes the students for the larger collaboration of the project, allowing more opportunities for students to iterate on their communication/collaboration strategies.
2. it allows and enhances the students' understanding of the learning objectives that already exist for each course.  Physics students are forced to clarify and articulate their understandings.  Math students see clearly how their calculations correspond to and inform real measurements and designs.
4. Determine a timeframe for project activities in each course.  We looked at our learning outcomes (particularly in Algebra and Physics), considered how the needs of the project interacted with content we already intended to teach, and set a tentative schedule for collaboration between courses.
5. Design opportunities for exhibition and celebration of the students' design process.  This is the area where our project is most poorly articulated.  We are still working to determine what kind of final deliverable makes sense given the possibilities and constraints our students work within, and what sort of audience will get to see those deliverables.  I think that had we done this before beginning the project, it would have further improved student buy-in and help sustain their curiosity and interest as the project enters difficult iterative stages.

These are the basic elements of our planning.  There are countless little details that will enrich this general formula (for instance, the intentional incorporation of self- and group- assessment after collaboration), but I leave the details to my qualified colleagues out there.

The Nueva School is featuring our bicycle project at its biannual Innovation Learning Challenge this afternoon in one of its #MashupILC sessions.  I can't wait to see the amazing ideas that will be generated.  Hopefully this design rationale will be helpful to those of you out there considering similar ideas.