Proposal Title: Establishing Interdisciplinary Learning Experiences Across STEM Fields at Bryn Mawr College
Why, given your current circumstances, available resources and changing context, is it timely for your instituition to tackle this opportunity?
Many of the most exciting problems in STEM fields straddle traditional departmental boundaries and will be solved only by interdisciplinary approaches. At Bryn Mawr College, there is strong interest from both faculty and students to participate in a curriculum that embraces an interdisciplinary philosophy. New options for pursuing interdisciplinary programs of study are being developed in many of the STEM departments at Bryn Mawr College. The PKAL initiative offers a timely opportunity to coordinate and build these efforts because it coincides with new funding initiatives and evolving faculty composition as detailed below.
1. One of the goals of the College’s current capital campaign is to raise resources to support faculty and student interest in disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas of investigation, especially in the STEM fields.
2. New hires are planned in four of the science departments over the next two years. These, together with the current cohort of junior and mid-career faculty will be an asset for developing interdisciplinary curricular initiatives across STEM fields.
3. Bryn Mawr College has recently been awarded grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Sherman-Fairchild Foundation, both of which have directed support for new interdisciplinary collaborations.
4. The preparation of entering students is increasingly diverse in STEM fields. We believe innovative interdisciplinary programs have greater potential for increasing scientific literacy as compared to traditional disciplinary approaches.
What is needed-barriers to overcome, questions to address, resources to secure- to move ahead?
Bryn Mawr College has a history where strong departmental autonomy and traditional disciplinary commitments were the favored means of providing exceptional education opportunities for women. While successful in creating women scientists, many of which have gone on to become leaders in their fields, this structure has hindered the development of interdisciplinary curricular offerings. Departments that struggle to cover courses required by the major in that discipline find the challenge to create new interdisciplinary courses or experiences a daunting one. A major barrier to moving forward is the lack of a common vision in how to integrate departmental goals with interdisciplinary programmatic goals.
We have identified several challenges to address:
1. Effective interdisciplinary work involves both quantitative and problem-solving skills. One of the challenges we face as educators in STEM fields is to increase quantitative literacy. A related challenge is to persuade students that problem-solving skills learned in one context can be applied in other situations.
2. Currently, entrance into each of the interdisciplinary concentrations requires students to take introductory courses in each of the contributing disciplines. Is it best to construct interdisciplinary learning experiences for students from individual interdisciplinary courses or best to put together a range of disciplinary offerings? Or if both, what is the right balance? Would a capstone interdisciplinary course for seniors meet our goals for students?
3. A change of institutional attitude towards team-taught courses is needed to encourage faculty members to take the extra time and effort that is needed to make such courses truly interdisciplinary and effective.
What does your vision of ''success'' look like, given your mission, resources, and potential to build and sustain a program of distinction?
At the end of three years, Bryn Mawr College aims to accomplish the following outcomes:
1. All STEM departments, including psychology, will participate in teaching at least one interdisciplinary course, and that students, independent of their major, receive major credit for taking an interdisciplinary course.
2. STEM faculty, working in conjunction with introductory laboratory science coordinators, will develop a laboratory-based integrated approach to provide a standardized set of quantitative reasoning skills to students in first year science and math courses.
3. That the faculty and administration will understand the importance of interdisciplinary learning experiences and will develop a set of guidelines that allow departments and individual faculty members the flexibility and freedom to explore and design new interdisciplinary initiatives throughout the College.
4. A reconceived Environmental Studies program will be in place that is rigorous enough to provide training in key areas of Environmental Science and one that is flexible enough to attract students with differing aspirations.
5. A diverse group of STEM faculty will have the political know-how, institutional support, and commitment to sustain these efforts.
Who are the faculty members on your team? A team consists of no more than five, including at least one key administrator, who will have leadership responsibility for developing and implementing an agenda to realize that vision.
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Anjali Thapar, Psychology
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Peter Brodfuehrer, Biology
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Sharon Burgmayer, Chemistry
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Don Barber, Geology
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Karen Tidmarsh, Dean of Undergraduate Education (Administrative Representative to the team)
Why this team is appropriate? This team represents several STEM disciplines and a range of junior and mid-career faculty. It also includes the Dean of the College who chairs our Curriculum Committee and has a long-standing commitment to the success of STEM initiatives at Bryn Mawr College.
Letter of support from the President
Donna Hecker will send us a Word file next week.
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