Interdisciplinarity & Collaboration
Joseph Rino
Summer 2019
I really appreciated the opportunity I had to spend time strictly thinking about pedagogy. Thinking about pedagogy is a critical part of my professional responsibilities, not only as full-time faculty, but as a teacher educator. However, I haven’t taken enough time to consider how practices I teach about could more fully impact the work I do in higher education. As I participated in readings for the CPLC, I spent a lot of time processing them through various lenses that I have picked up while working in education. This resulted in 2 blog posts (here and here) in which I tried to tie together the goals of the CPLC and issues of pedagogy that have long been part of my epistemology.
In addition to that theoretical work, I spent time considering ideas brought up by the CPLC and individuals they follow on Twitter, in search of some immediate changes I could make to my current courses. I have been reworking all of my course projects to better incorporate different aspects of gold-standard PBL. I have also converted one course to being completely “ungraded”. I also rewrote the syllabus from that course with an eye toward making the syllabus more humane.
Though I had already made a commitment to open education prior to my work in CPLC, participating has opened up possibilities and projects for improving the interdisciplinarity and impact in the community of my courses. I am working with other faculty in my program to make more purposeful connections across courses (particularly across content areas) that would encourage student work to span individual courses and to move with students across semesters. I would also expect that work to directly impact local schools. As we move forward with this work, I expect that the Co-Lab and CPLC participants will continue to be an amazing resource for me.