This book is written for faculty who are engaged in team teaching or who, as committee members, department chairs, or deans, are contemplating or planning interdisciplinary team-taught courses. Although most courses in colleges and universities have traditionally found their home within a particular discipline--biology, history, art, sociology--or a professional specialization--accounting, constitutional law, pediatric nursing, school administration--many colleges and universities today are discovering the limits of specialization and are experimenting with alternatives to the traditional format of discipline-based courses. Although disciplinary and professional specializations are still useful for discovery of knowledge, presentation of foundational concepts, and introduction of the specialized methods of the discipline, many institutions find this structure inadequate as the only method of organizing knowledge for instruction. Unfortunately, problems in the "real world" seldom present themselves in tidy, disciplinary packages; there is much that needs to be explored in other formats.

Today, interest in developing courses that provide interdisciplinary perspectives is increasing. Offering these courses often requires two or more faculty members to plan and carry out instruction as a team, thus breaking a traditional norm: one professor presenting, for the duration of the course, one perspective, his or her specialization.

In Part I of this book, I explore in depth the definition and rationale for interdisciplinary courses and the dynamics of team teaching. I have selected five examples from my own institution, the University of Denver, to use as illustrations. Because the courses are the focus in Part I, I decided not to select examples from several institutions, but rather to hold constant (or eliminate) the variables associated with differences in setting. Instead I chose five very different courses from the same institution to illustrate how interdisciplinary courses are planned and executed. I interviewed the faculty who taught in these courses to understand their struggles and satisfactions, and I also surveyed the students in these courses to understand student responses to team teaching. The five courses used as illustrations are:

Making of the Modern Mind. Designed for freshmen and sophomores and meeting the core curriculum requirement in the humanities, this course provides students the opportunity to explore the central assumptions, attitudes, and cultural expressions of Western Culture that determine how we view ourselves and our "modern" world. The course is team taught by faculty from philosophy, literature, music, religious studies, and art history. The course offers a year-long sequence of lectures and demonstrations in conjunction with small seminars of approximately 20 students each.

Multiple Voices of America. Designed as a new way of presenting the study of American history, this course provides an opportunity for undergraduates to gain an appreciation of the role of Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, and various immigrant groups in shaping American culture and political forms. The course brings together specialists from history, religious studies, literature, and art, who are assisted by teaching assistants with diverse cultural backgrounds.

The Origin and Evolution of Life. Developed for nonscience majors, this course allows undergraduate students to explore Charles Darwin's thesis that all life on earth has evolved from a common ancestral form by means of a naturalistic process. The course is centered around three organizing themes: (1) evaluating why scientists believe evolution happened, (2) evaluating how scientists believe evolution occurs, and (3) evaluating plausible answers to some of the major questions still posed by the theory. The faculty are drawn from the fields of biology and anthropology.

The Lawyering Process. This course is required of all first-year law students, both day and evening divisions, and is designed to introduce students to the three sources of law--case law, legislation, and administrative law--and to provide a context in which students can develop the skills used in legal practice, for example, interviewing clients, locating relevant case law, writing briefs, taking depositions, preparing for trial, requesting motions, and filing appeals. The entering class is divided into 16 simulated law firms paired to work on opposite sides (plaintiff and defendant) of carefully elaborated problem cases. The firms are staffed by the students and a senior partner (practicing attorney), a junior partner (upper division student), a writing consultant, and a librarian consultant. A core of four faculty organizes the course, provides lectures, trains participants, generates case material, selects readings, develops assignments, and evaluates student progress.

The Quality Panorama. This team-taught course in the newly developed Integrated Master's in Business Administration (MBA) program focuses on Total Quality Management (TQM). The course draws on the expertise of faculty in accounting, marketing, and management, as well as on the real world experience of a new faculty member formerly employed by a local telecommunications corporation.

The focus of Part I, therefore, is on the structure of interdisciplinary courses and the delivery of team teaching at the micro-context level.

In Part II, interdisciplinary courses are examined within the contexts of the programs where they most frequently reside. To gain this broader perspective, I collected a file of examples of interdisciplinary courses drawn from a broad list of institutions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. A list of "promising prospects" was compiled and an invitation was sent to the presidents of selected institutions to nominate examples of interdisciplinary team-taught courses at their institution. For the courses that were selected, a faculty contact person at the institution was asked to send a packet of materials from which annotated descriptions were developed. The courses were then clustered for discussion according to various contexts, for example, general education, interdisciplinary studies, gender studies, international studies, etc. The courses are introduced with brief discussions of the context, and are then elaborated in some detail to provide a stimulus for further thought about how interdisciplinary team-taught courses can be used to accomplish different goals in different contexts.

Written with the busy faculty member in mind, this book is designed to be a useful guide, with practical illustrations, to planning for interdisciplinary courses and delivering them through team teaching. As such, it is a sympathetic treatment of the subject, and contains some advocacy. The advocacy is supplemented, however, with a significant amount of discussion of the obstacles to creating and sustaining interdisciplinary courses and the problems involved in team teaching. Furthermore, interdisciplinary courses are not presented here as a panacea for all of the ills of postsecondary education today. Team teaching is a good alternative to traditional teaching, but it is not the only alternative. It will flourish best in the right setting and only with proper nurture by those who are committed to the educational values it best facilitates.

In the first chapter of Part I, I explore various types of arrangements for teaming and establish a tentative definition of team teaching. I introduce the five examples and measure their similarities and differences against four criteria of collaboration. In the second chapter, I set forth the historical and philosophical foundations of the disciplines and professions and examine the limitations of specialization. I also develop a rationale for interdisciplinary courses and team teaching as a response to the problem of specialization. In the third chapter, I provide a menu of what to consider for those planning to approximate the "ideal" interdisciplinary team-taught course. The examples of the previous chapters serve, with other suggestions and ideas, as illustrations for this chapter. In the fourth chapter, I explore the opportunities and problems of working in teams by drawing on the literature on groups and teams and applying it to the stresses and strains that naturally develop when faculty members work together in teams. The fifth chapter contains the results of the interviews with faculty about their experiences with and responses to interdisciplinary courses and team teaching and the results of the student survey. In the sixth chapter, I summarize what has been learned and discuss future prospects for interdisciplinary courses and team teaching.

In Part II, I set forth the methodology for gathering and arranging the selected examples, describe various contexts for interdisciplinary courses, and present the selected examples. Collectively, the examples provide a stimulating accumulation of ideas about interdisciplinary courses and team teaching that should be useful to those planning such courses at their own institutions.

I found myself in a unique position to write a book on team teaching. First, I was involved as a faculty member in an undergraduate, team-taught, core curriculum class entitled "Social Science as a Craft." I served as a member of the team that developed, revised, and offered that course over a period of five years; from that experience I have personal, first-hand knowledge of what is involved, intellectually and emotionally, in team teaching. I've been there.

Second, I am currently serving as Special Assistant to the Provost for Academic Quality and Assessment of Student Learning. In this position I am responsible for coordinating the work of our institution in faculty development and assessment, but I also serve as a roving consultant on curriculum planning and course development. In other words, the University makes me available (free) to our various colleges, schools, and departments as a consultant. In this role, I have become acquainted with the team teaching taking place at our institution across many levels and fields of study. In one instance, I have served as the facilitator of the faculty team responsible for planning, revising, and implementing our largest and most complicated team-taught course, the required first-year course in the College of Law.

Third, I work at an institution that has had, over the years, an extensive involvement with interdisciplinary courses: the University of Denver, an independent, doctoral-granting institution with an enrollment of approximately 7,000 students, evenly divided among undergraduates, graduates, and nontraditional students. As early as the 1950s, the faculty in the arts and sciences divisions had experimented with interdisciplinary courses for general education, including a course in the sciences entitled "Science in the Modern World." In 1973, the University attracted a multi-year grant of over $1 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a program of "block courses" designed to allow students to meet one of their general education requirements through an interdisciplinary 15-credit hour course in one term. Through grant support, the University developed a series of nine block courses around critical eras of particular civilizations, such as classical Athens, twelfth-century Paris, Gupta India, Elizabethan England, Sung China, Weimar Germany, and twentieth-century Black America. Unfortunately, at a critical moment in the development of the program, undergraduate enrollment began to decline, and as grant support for "soft money" specialists disappeared and the number of faculty was reduced, the block option faded out. The University was left, however, with useful experience in producing interdisciplinary courses. Nonetheless, arrangements for meeting general education requirements reverted to a distributive system. Although many members of the faculty wanted to do something more interesting and effective, the committee charged with review of the general education curriculum had difficulty marshalling support for changes. In 1984, after years of faculty indecision about how to reform general education, a new chancellor mandated an interdisciplinary core curriculum as part of a wider reorganization of the University. He didn't mandate the content of that core curriculum, just that there would be one. After much faculty resistance and venting of anger about perceived intrusion in the curriculum, some senior faculty took the lead in developing a magnificent series of interdisciplinary, team-taught courses from which students could choose to meet their general education requirements. The sources of team teaching at the graduate professional level are more recent and are more self-directed. All in all, the University of Denver now has some excellent examples of team teaching and a growing reputation for it, and I am in the fortunate position of being able to draw on these examples as illustrations in the chapters that follow.

Fourth, I have thought about teaching over most of my career and written about it elsewhere. I am the author of a recent, more comprehensive book on teaching entitled Better Teaching, More Learning: Strategies for Success in Postsecondary Settings (Phoenix: American Council on Education/Oryx Press, 1993). In that work, I presented in detail five teaching strategies based on corresponding paradigms of learning. Much of what good teachers do can also be done by teachers working in teams, and I assume that effective team teachers will also consciously select teaching strategies and use them in appropriate ways. The focus of this book, however, is on the critical characteristics of the team setting and the particular opportunities and problems that grow out of this unique instructional configuration.

There is much serious and useful conversation today about the improvement of teaching. The pressure is on us as teachers to do a better job whenever we step into the classroom. There is growing documentation of a huge gap between where society has moved--more information-based, global, complex, and confused--and what institutions of higher education do to prepare students for life in that society. What many professors do, persistently without much self-reflection, is go into classrooms (alone because it is their classroom), start talking, and write things (as the spirit moves them) on the chalkboard. The days are over when any conscientious professor can be satisfied with this as the dominant mode of teaching, when there are really so many viable, well-elaborated alternatives. Team teaching, when effectively implemented, is one of these alternatives. It not only changes the arrangements for learning, it engages the team members in serious and continuous reflection on what they are doing. Ultimately, this reflection may be the most important contribution of team teaching, allowing and requiring instructors to articulate and justify before their colleagues the choice of activities that take place in their classrooms.