The Synergistic Classroom

Interdisciplinary Teaching in the Small College Setting

Corey Campion, Aaron Angello

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978818439
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Among the many challenges confronting the liberal arts today is a fundamental disconnect between the curricula that many institutions offer and the training that many students need. Discipline-specific models of teaching and learning can underprepare students for the kinds of interdisciplinary collaboration that employers now expect. Although aware of these expectations and the need for change, many small colleges and universities have struggled to translate interdisciplinarity into programs and curricula that better serve today's students.Written by faculty engaged in the design and delivery of interdisciplinary courses, programs, and experiential learning opportunities in the small college setting, The Synergistic Classroom addresses the many ways faculty can leverage their institutions' small size and openness to pedagogical experimentation to overcome the challenges of limited institutional resources and enrollment concerns and better prepare students for life and work in the twenty-first century. Taken together, the contributions in this volume invite reflection on a variety of important issues that attend the work of small college faculty committed to expanding student learning across disciplinary boundaries.

Part I

Teaching across the Disciplines

1

The Anxiety of Interdisciplinary Teaching

AARON ANGELLO

Imagine yourself in this scenario: it is the first day of class, and you are standing before a group of students. Most of them appear engaged and eager, some look like they’d rather still be in bed, one student in the back of the classroom is obviously struggling to not look at her phone. You feel the familiar nervousness that you feel at the beginning of every semester, but this moment is different. This is the first time you have taught this class. Perhaps this is the first class of its kind to be offered at your institution. Unlike the courses you have taught before, courses that are traditionally discipline specific and in which you confidently consider yourself an expert, this course will explore the convergence of multiple topics from different disciplines. After all, faculty at small colleges like yours are increasingly being asked to teach these kinds of courses, either because of institutional pressure to reach enrollment numbers or, perhaps more optimistically, because small colleges offer faculty more opportunities to teach outside their areas of specialization. You consider yourself an authority of sorts in a few of the topics you’ll be addressing in the course, but certainly not in all of them. In fact, much of the subject matter is entirely new to you, quite unrelated to your areas of specialization. You have done your research, but you have a nagging suspicion that some of your students may be more familiar with the information you will be presenting than you yourself are.

This is a daunting prospect for many of us, and an all too familiar one—one that most of us do not have to imagine because we have experienced it. As professors, we are supposed to be the holders and purveyors of knowledge. When we find ourselves in a position in which we may fall short, the very foundations of whom we understand ourselves to be are shaken; our very sense of self-identity is called into question. This chapter examines some approaches to understanding our perceived sense of self, primarily as presented in theories of identity narratives. As we move beyond the anxiety we experience when our identities are challenged, we are enabled to provide a more productive learning environment for students. The chapter presents specific strategies that I, and others, have employed in the classroom both to mitigate our own anxiety and to empower students.

I am a scholar of modern and contemporary poetry. That is, in large part, who I am. While working on my PhD, I developed an academic interest in the meeting of digital media and experimental poetry, and I focused my attention on making myself somewhat of a specialist in it. This specialization is itself interdisciplinary, of course; in addition to knowing poetry and poetics, a specialist in digital poetry must have a grasp of media theory, hardware and software systems, various programming languages, user interface theory, and so on. While I am confident when it comes to my understanding of these things as they directly relate to the composition, distribution, and consumption of poetry, I am by no means a computer scientist. I am a bit of a hack, frankly, when it comes to writing code, and the mathematics often employed in algorithmic structures can at times baffle me.

I am not a programmer or a software engineer, but because of my background, I tend to be the go-to “digital media guy” in my department. I work with an amazing group of colleagues, all brilliant and remarkably capable, some incredibly proficient with technology—but there are six of us. This is a reality of teaching at a small liberal arts college and one of the institutional characteristics that differentiates us from faculty at, say, a research university. When it comes to the courses we teach, we all must extend ourselves beyond our proverbial comfort zone. We have to put ourselves into situations in which we might not feel entirely comfortable and in control more frequently than faculty at larger institutions.

I often find myself teaching media courses with content that extends well beyond the areas of knowledge with which I am comfortable. For example, I recently taught a graduate course titled Introduction to Digital Humanities. This particular course was a part of our Master of Arts in Humanities curriculum, but what I am describing here applies to interdisciplinary courses at all levels. Many students in the course held degrees in English, art, education, and history, and there were several computer science students in the class as well. I have worked on a few digital humanities projects in the past, and I felt entirely comfortable teaching some of the topics covered in the course. I have previously worked, for example, on digital mapping projects; I have done some visual analyses of textual corpora with various software platforms; and I have done a bit of network visualization. I understand these subjects fairly well, and I felt confident introducing them to my students.

However, digital humanities is, by its very nature, interdisciplinary. It is often described as a “big tent” that includes many disciplines, or even a field that exists in the space between disciplines, a meeting place.¹ Teaching it can prove difficult, particularly if a single instructor teaches the course. Instructors teaching courses like this may be inclined to shift the focus to content with which they are more comfortable and neglect areas that might have proven more useful to students. On the other hand, they may choose to venture boldly into unfamiliar territory. In my course, I chose to do the latter. At various times throughout the semester, when the content of the course veered away from areas about which I felt particularly knowledgeable, I was struck with a palpable feeling of anxiety. I felt like a fraud, like I was not who others thought I was. Perhaps more significantly, I was not who I understood myself to be.

Scholars have argued that one way of understanding our subjective experience is through an analysis of biographical narrative.² I find this approach particularly useful when exploring the professional/professorial self in the classroom because these narratives are so long-standing and pervasive. We communicate who we are to others with the stories we tell about ourselves, but we also reinforce our own beliefs about who we are by repeating these stories to ourselves: I am a scholar of x, an expert in y; I grew up in a challenging environment, which gives me a unique perspective on my particular field; I come from a long line of academics; I have an aptitude for z because of my social position, gender, class, sexuality, etc.; I worked all throughout my PhD program and still finished my dissertation ahead of schedule; I spent hours in a corner of the library reading everything I could about my field. Story-statements like these are how we understand ourselves and how we communicate to others who we are. These stories will alter and shift depending on audience, environment, and when the story is told. However, as a part of these narratives, we also maintain an image of an essential core that is our constant self. “The story of the self, of the presentation of identity, is … fluid but the aim is always to present the story, or part of the story, of an integrated whole being,” and we hold tightly to that understanding of ourselves.³

These personal narratives are not easy things to isolate or define. Not only are there countless narrative threads that comprise our own stories, all interrelated and overlapping, but also our personal narratives exist within us and in relation to preexisting social narratives. “The individual self and the story are reflected and confirmed by those stories that are the meaning-making currency of the particular culture of the individual.”⁴ We tell our stories to make sense of our present selves, but those stories are also inextricably tied to the social narratives that establish and perpetuate hierarchies.⁵ The stories that we, as academics, often tell about ourselves, along with the stories about how societies are constructed, differentiate us from those who are not academics; they situate us within a position of power and authority that is unique to our position. The professor is the one who knows, the consummate expert, the final word on “proper” knowledge.

Indeed, the narratives that one uses to construct and maintain the self are multiple and fluid.⁶ One is a different person at work than at home, different with one’s parents than with one’s children, different at the pub than at a faculty meeting, but the title “professor” carries with it a set of expectations that can be internalized to such an extent as to become foundational to the professor’s very being. A professor might be queer, a person of color, brought up in a particular social stratum, the life of the party, the serious scholar, a nonconformist to a gender binary, very traditional—but the person is always, in the eyes of society and in self-concept, a professor. When their professional identity is challenged, when the authority that in part defines them is undermined, professors can find themselves unmoored from a place of psychological and emotional safety and set adrift on an absolutely unfamiliar sea of insecurity.

Sociologist Keri Lerum began using the term “academic armor”⁷ to describe the kinds of protections academics employ, often unconsciously, to maintain their “expert positions or jurisdictions.”⁸ The term can be useful here. Lerum divides academic armor into three categories: linguistic, physical, and ideological. It is worth taking a moment to explore each of these as they relate to insecurities that arise from interdisciplinary teaching. Linguistic armor is the use of jargon or obscure language when simpler, more direct language will suffice. Linguistic armor separates the expert from everyone else, and it creates distance between the professor and the student. Very often, when challenged in the classroom or when encountering information that we feel entirely unprepared to address, we retreat behind linguistic barricades that reinforce our intellectual and educational superiority. Physical armor shields the body. It is, quite literally, the costume that the professor wears to signify authority.⁹ Finally, there is ideological armor. This is the sense that our intelligence or education gives us jurisdiction over those whose knowledge and experience are not institutionally sanctioned. Lerum uses the example of an academic researcher, a sociologist who is working with sex workers in the field, to illustrate the way ideological armor is manifest. When the researcher began to feel challenged by the women she was interviewing, when she felt “sexually intimidated by these women,”¹⁰ her default was to retreat into a position of “intellectual superiority.”¹¹ In other words, there is an established social hierarchy that places the academic’s purported knowledge above other kinds of knowledge and provides a place of safety from which challenges to the academic’s identity can be successfully parried.

While this sociologist’s situation differs markedly from the typical college classroom, Lerum’s example does illustrate the ways in which we, when our professional identity is challenged, retreat more deeply into our own self-perception as an academic. When we step into the classroom, that academic armor protects the hierarchical relationship between student and professor. We are supposed to be the ones disseminating information, directing conversation, and guiding the student to the correct answers.

Of course, anyone who is reading this chapter, or this volume, undoubtedly values teaching and is well versed in current ideas concerning pedagogy. We all know that standing in front of a classroom and lecturing is generally considered an ineffectual teaching style. We try to construct “active learning environments” to provide opportunities for student discussion. We work to identify alternate ways students can present the outcomes of their learning. We work to create opportunities for students to contribute their unique perspectives to the classroom environment. In spite of this, however, we continue to understand ourselves through identity narratives, and we always want to be in control...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Building Bridges in a Land of Colleges
• Part I: Teaching across the Disciplines
• Part II: Programming across the Disciplines
• Part III: Exploring across the Disciplines
• Notes on Contributors
• Index