Call to participants EXPRESSION OF INTEREST IN PRESENTING:
Dear Members of the Interdisciplinary Community of Practice,
In preparation for the coming academic year we are putting together a list of activities related to interdisciplinary that we would like to invite you to participate in as a presenter!
Please see the dates and list of topics below.
Note that we are open to a variety of different (presentation) formats ranging from panel discussions, directed readings, stand-and-deliver lectures, group workshop, or other setups you think might work well.
PowerPoint will of course be available but we can also provide other presentation mediums (e.g. flipchart, whiteboard, TV, internet) for each meeting topic.
We have taken your feedback from our last meeting (April 29, 2014) to structure our activities, and our hope is that this notice will allow as many of you to participate as possible.
We invite you to submit your willingness to participate, the session you think you would like to contribute to, and some brief ideas of how you think the session might be best organized.
The Interdisciplinary Community of Practice (ICoP) is a diverse volunteer network of faculty, staff, and students across UBC who seek to support each other in our ability to teach and learn in this area.
Please take a minute to look at the proposed plans for 2014-2015 and send an email to ctlt.icop@ubc.ca with your expression of interest. A more complete and updated version of the 2014-2015 activities will be circulated in advance of the beginning of the Fall Term.
In kind regards,
The ICoP Co-Facilitators
Jackie Davis, Adriana Sedeno and Conor Douglas
SUGGESTED TOPICS AND DATES
September 25th (Thursday)
Topic: What is interdisciplinarity?
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Place: I.K. Barber Learning Center Room 2.22A
Details: For the kick-off meeting of the academic year and the new ICoP structure we invite participants to help us explore the meaning of ‘interdisciplinarity’. There are many neologisms that are often conflated with interdisciplinarity (i.e. multidisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, nondisciplinary, transdisciplinary) it is our hope to explore what interdisciplinarity is, and what sets it apart –if anything- from other practices.
October 30th (Thursday)
Topic: Facilitating interdisciplinary exchanges across classrooms
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Place: I.K. Barber Learning Center Room 2.22A
Details: This session looks to explore how can teaching and learning benefit from interdisciplinary exchanges. The hope is that our community can reflect on successful interdisciplinary teaching collaborations, and lay some structural ground work -in the form of information exchange and matchmaking- of how interdisciplinary teaching exchanges across UBC can be facilitated.
November 27th (Thursday)
Topic: Designing interdisciplinary curriculum
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Place: I.K. Barber Learning Center Room 2.22A
Details: Our hope is that this session will provide some direction or best practices for interdisciplinary curriculum design, and help participants to identify early-on the challenges of such as task.
December – NO MEETING
2015
January 29th (Thursday)
Topic: Models for interdisciplinary teaching
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Place: I.K. Barber Learning Center Room 2.22A
Details: There is no one correct way for teaching in an interdisciplinary context. What is more, interdisciplinarity presents particular challenges in teaching and learning. Our hope is that this session will open up discussions on different ways of interdisciplinary teaching, and raise awareness of how participants might be able to navigate this specific kind of instruction.
February 26th (Thursday)
Topic: Assessment/evaluation of interdisciplinary projects/courses
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Place: I.K. Barber Learning Center Room 2.22A
Details: Teaching interdisciplinarity can be a challenge, but one way of helping can be conducting interdisciplinary projects. Our hope is that this session will not only explore how to set-up these projects, but more specifically our goals is how to explore how assessment can take place within interdisciplinary courses (and the projects there within).
April 30th (Thursday)
Topic: Administrative challenges of interdisciplinary teaching and learning.
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Place: I.K. Barber Learning Center Room 2.22A
Details: The pedagogy of interdisciplinary teaching and learning is not the only challenge faced by instructors interested in interdisciplinairity. This session will explore some of the tasks that take place outside of the classroom that are relevant to interdisciplinary teaching. This includes balancing teaching load across faculties (and the concurrent budget implications), and UBC’s position on interdisciplinary teaching and learning.
May 28th (Thursday)
Topic: Linking interdisciplinary research and teaching
Time: 3:00-4:30pm
Place: I.K. Barber Learning Center Room 2.22A
Details: The three missions of the university are teaching, research, and community service, and it is broadly understood that these missions are best realized when there is a connection between them. This final ICoP session of the academic year will focus on how an academic’s research can be brought into the classroom, and the particular issues that are faced when doing so in an interdisciplinary context.