TwitterGraduate Teaching Certificate
The Impact of Team-Teaching Interdisciplinary Courses on Graduate Students' Conceptions of Teaching and Learning
Graduate students rarely have the opportunity to teach their own courses as part of their doctoral training. Therefore, there is little research on the impact of interdisciplinary teaching on graduate students' professional development. Using personal reflections, course materials, and student work from 6 different interdisciplinary courses, this project examines the benefits and challenges to graduate students designing and teaching interdisciplinary courses.
The Impact of Team-Teaching Interdisciplinary Courses on Graduate Students' Conceptions of Teaching and Learning
In this project we sought to answer the following questions:
- How does team teaching interdisciplinary courses affect how graduate student instructors think about teaching and learning?
- What are the benefits and challenges of such teaching opportunities for graduate students, in contrast to established faculty members?
- How do these interdisciplinary courses affect how undergraduate students learn?
We describe how pairs of graduate students developed unique courses that bridged a range of disciplines. In the process of designing and implementing these courses, the graduate students confronted their own disciplinary assumptions while discovering that they were better able to promote metacognition in their undergraduate students.
Our preliminary analysis finds that graduate students, especially those in the STEM disciplines, do indeed benefit from such an interdisciplinary teaching opportunity. The experience exposes graduate students to a broader range of methods while encouraging them to move beyond their disciplinary boundaries. These benefits for graduate students seem to be distinct from benefits for faculty because of the potentially greater impact on the students' future development as faculty members.
