Conference Working Group

Leaders of Session 1: The Roles of Disciplines in Interdisciplinary Curricula

Marci Sortor joined St. Olaf College in 2011 to serve as its Provost and Dean of the College, and is a member of St. Olaf's department of history. She received a PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 1988, and held a teaching and research fellowship at Stanford University before moving to the Midwest to join the history faculty at Grinnell College in 1989. Dr. Sortor served Grinnell College for twenty-one years in various capacities, including as Professor of History, Chair of the Department of History, Associate Dean of the College, Vice President of Institutional Planning, and interim Vice President for College and Alumni Relations. During her time as department chair, she was program director for a National Endowment for the Humanities Focus Grant for the development of a new, cross-cultural introduction to the study of history. While serving at Grinnell College, Dr. Sortor implemented an interdisciplinary curricular initiative that was part of Grinnell College's strategic plan. This work entailed identifying new areas for curricular growth and developing new faculty lines to bring new knowledge and perspectives to the college.

Other interdisciplinary work includes library planning and developing new kinds of teaching spaces for the Humanities and Social Studies. She has taught interdisciplinary courses on disease and societies and on the Renaissance, and team-taught interdisciplinary courses on "Renaissance and Medieval Culture" and "Conceptions of Space and Place in the Ancient Mediterranean and Medieval Europe." Dr. Sortor has given presentations and published on the economic history of northern European cities, medieval market systems, and immigrants in fifteenth-century cities. Her current research project, "Work, Business, and Investments: Economic Networks in a Fifteenth-century City," entails exploring the intersection of social networks and profitable connections for medieval city dwellers.

Barbara M. Bekken is a faculty member in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech and a former director of the Earth Sustainability liberal education program. This interdisciplinary and problem-focused four-semester series was designed to foster student intellectual development within a learning community while meeting all of Virginia Tech's general education requirements. Dr. Bekken's research focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of course design and faculty development on both student learning and cognitive and social development. She holds a PhD from Stanford University in geology and has spent the better part of the last decade immersed in the literature on college student development and learning. Her interest in interdisciplinary teaching grew out of her experience; today's complex world necessitates that students must be able to integrate their diverse course experiences in general education with their educational and life's goals.

Through her work in resources geology, Dr. Bekken recognized an opportunity to capture students' interest in broad issues of sustainable use of natural resources and to channel this curiosity and energy into a thematic general education programming opportunity. Realizing this vision necessitated developing a team of faculty and other professionals to integrate the goals of general education with sustainability issues in an interdisciplinary two-year program predicated on developing increasingly sophisticated learners and knowers. Virginia Tech's Earth Sustainability liberal education program was born of this vision. Since inception in 2004, more than 200 students have completed the program, many of whom regard their experience in Earth Sustainability as their most valuable undertaking in college.

Douglas B. Luckie is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in the Lyman Briggs College of Science (a residential program) and in the Department of Physiology at Michigan State University. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in Molecular Physiology and completed his postdoctoral studies at Stanford University in Human Biology. He is director of the CF Research Lab and STEM Learning Lab (http://www.msu.edu/~luckie). He and his research groups pursue both discipline-based physiology research into pH abnormalities and invasive pathogens in the disease, cystic fibrosis, as well as scholarship into the use of visual models, interdisciplinary discourse, and inquiry laboratories to increase student higher-level learning in the sciences.

Recent Articles:
D.B. Luckie, R. Bellon, and R. Sweeder (2011) The "BRAID": Experiments in Stitching Together Disciplines at a Big 10 University, Journal of STEM Education (accepted September, 2011, in press).

D.B. Luckie, S.H. Harrison and D. Ebert-May (2011) Model Based Reasoning: Creating Visual Tools to Reveal Student Learning, 35(1): 59-67 Advances in Physiology Education.

M.D. Haenisch, T.A. Ciche and D.B. Luckie (2010) Pseudomonas or LPS exposure alters CFTR iodide efflux in 2WT2 epithelial cells with time and dose dependence. Biochem Biophys Res Commun., 394: 4, 1087-1092.

William H. Newell is professor of interdisciplinary studies at Miami University, where he has taught interdisciplinary courses full-time since 1974, when he was a founding faculty member of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (aka Western College Program). He received his AB in philosophy from Amherst College and his PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and taught interdisciplinary as well as economics courses at Temple University and in the Paracollege at St. Olaf College prior to teaching at Miami University. In 1979 he hosted a conference on the teaching of interdisciplinary social science at which the Association for Integrative Studies was founded, and served as its first president. Since 1983 he has served AIS first as newsletter editor and then the executive director as well, positions he holds to this day. Over the last quarter century he has worked as a consultant or external evaluator on interdisciplinary studies on well over a hundred occasions, often returning to campuses for repeat visits and giving numerous public addresses.

In the early 1990s he was awarded a three-year FIPSE grant to set up the Institute in Integrative Studies, which over that decade brought around a hundred faculty members from over forty institutions to Oxford, Ohio to observe the Western Program, participate in a pro-seminar on interdisciplinarity, and design an interdisciplinary course. Newell has edited three books and guest-edited three journals, and published over forty articles and chapters on interdisciplinary studies, many examining its connections with higher education, complex systems theory, public administration, integrative learning, liberal arts, experimental colleges, critical thinking, citizenship, and even web design. For the last half dozen years he has been mentoring scholars writing on interdisciplinary studies and reviewing manuscripts on interdisciplinary studies for a wide array of professional journals and edited books.

Richard Vaz received a PhD in electrical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), specializing in signal analysis and machine vision. He held systems and design engineering positions with the Raytheon Company, GenRad Inc., and the MITRE Corporation before joining the WPI Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty in 1987. Rick is currently Dean of Interdisciplinary and Global Studies at WPI, with oversight of WPI's Interactive Qualifying Project requirement and a worldwide network of 26 Project Centers through which over 600 students per year complete academic research projects.

His teaching and research interests include interdisciplinary, service, and experiential learning, local and regional sustainability, engineering design and appropriate technology, and internationalizing engineering education. He has developed and directed hundreds of student research projects in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia. Rick has published over 40 papers in peer-reviewed forums and is the recipient of numerous teaching and advising awards including the WPI Trustees' Awards for Outstanding Teaching and for Outstanding Advising. Rick is a Senior Member of IEEE and from 2004 to 2010 served as a Senior Science Fellow of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He lives in Worcester, and his interests outside academia include golf, food, wine, and the Boston Red Sox.

Kevin Hovland is Senior Director of Global Learning and Curricular Change at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, working in the office of Diversity, Equity, and Global Initiatives. He is responsible for the multi-project initiative, Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility. The most recent Shared Futures project, General Education for a Global Century, is working with 32 colleges and universities to use global learning outcomes as an organizing principle for creating coherent and comprehensive general education curricular designs. That project is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Hovland is the author of the AAC&U monograph, Shared Futures: Global Learning and Liberal Education as well as several articles further articulating global learning as an essential outcome of liberal education. He is also program director for AAC&U's annual meeting, project director for The Educated Citizen and Public Health, and executive editor of Diversity & Democracy: Civic Learning for Shared Futures, an AAC&U periodical designed to provide campus practitioners with readily available information about successful diversity initiatives around the country and to support academic leaders and educators as they design and reshape their diversity programs, civic engagement initiatives, and global learning opportunities to better prepare students for principled action in today's complex world. He earned a BA in Russian Regional Studies from Columbia University and is ABD in History at Georgetown University.

Bernard L. Madison was Mathematical Sciences Department Chair for 10 years and Dean of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences for 10 years at the University of Arkansas, where he has been since 1979. At Louisiana State University from 1966 to 1979, he was principally engaged in research in topology and algebra in addition to serving as Director of Basic and Applied Mathematics for three years. He has served in many national roles including chairing the MAA's committees on Placement Examinations, Status of the Profession, Articulation and Placement, and Assessment.

During the period 1986-1989, he structured and directed the Mathematical Sciences in the Year 2000 at the National Research Council, which included the 1987 National Forum, Calculus for a New Century. Dr. Madison served in multiple roles with the College Board including Chief Reader for AP Calculus. He has directed several NSF-funded national dissemination and research projects. For the past ten years he has spent much of his time promoting qunatitative literacy, including serving as the founding president of the interdisciplinary National Numeracy Network. At present his work on quantitative literacy, teacher education, and placement testing is supported by NSF grants. Dr. Madison has a BS in mathematics and physics from Western Kentucky University and MS and PhD degrees in mathematics from the University of Kentucky.

Tanya Augsburg is Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies in the areas of the Creative Arts and Humanities at San Francisco State University, where she is Chair of the University Interdisciplinary Council. She is author of Becoming Interdisciplinary: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies, 2nd Ed. (Kendall/Hunt, 2006) and editor with Stuart Henry of The Politics of Interdisciplinary Studies: Essays on Transformations in American Undergraduate Programs (McFarland, 2009). She has published two articles in Issues in Integrative Studies and three reviews in the Association for Integrative Studies Newsletter. She has also published in other interdisciplinary academic journals such as The Drama Review and Critical Matrix. Dr. Augsburg was the Co-Principal Investigator for a 2008 AAC&U's VALUE Initiative grant, which involved the testing of the effectiveness of the VALUE integrative learning and written communication rubrics. She is juror and co-curator of the Women's Caucus for Art's (WCA) art exhibition Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze, which takes place at San Francisco's SOMArts in 2011 and at the Kinsey Institute Gallery in 2012.

She is also editor of the exhibition's accompanying catalogue. Her most recent teaching and research examine interdisciplinary studies pedagogy as well as multiple modes of self-presentation, which includes student portfolios. She has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Association for Integrative Studies (AIS) since 2006, and is an avid tracker of interdisciplinary education trends in higher education.

Julie Thompson Klein is Professor of Humanities in the English Department and Faculty Fellow in the Office for Teaching and Learning at Wayne State University. She also has held posts as Visiting Foreign Professor at Shimane University in Matsue, Japan; Fulbright Lecturer at Tribhuvan University in Nepal; Academic Specialist for the U.S. Information Agency in Kathmandu; and Foundation Visitor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She was a Senior Fellow at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU), and in Fall 2011 a Visiting Professor and Mellon Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Institute. Holder of a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oregon, Dr. Klein is past president of the Association for Integrative Studies (AIS) and former editor of the AIS journal, Issues in Integrative Studies. Her books include Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (l990), Interdisciplinary Studies Today (co-edited, 1994), Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (1996), Transdisciplinarity: Joint Problem Solving among Science, Technology, and Society (co-edited, 2001), Interdisciplinary Education in K-12 and College (edited, 2002), the monograph Mapping Interdisciplinary Studies (1999), Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy (2005), and Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures (2010). She also was Associate Editor of the Oxford Handbook on Interdisciplinarity (2010), and is co-editor of the University of Michigan Press series Digital Humanities@digitalculturebooks.At present she is completing a new book on Mapping Digital Humanities.

Dr. Klein received the Kenneth Boulding Award for outstanding scholarship on interdisciplinarity, the Yamamoorthy & Yeh Distinguished Transdisciplinary Achievement Award, and the Joseph Katz Award for distinguished contributions to the scholarship of General and Liberal Education. She also was a member of numerous national task forces on interdisciplinary studies and research and has advised the U.S. National Institutes of Health, National Academies of Science, and National Science Foundation on interdisciplinary research and evaluation.

Paula J. S. Martin is Assistant Director for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor at Kenai Peninsula College in the University of Alaska Anchorage. She has over a decade of experience leading undergraduate interdisciplinary environmental programs paired with extensive experience in academic affairs at both private and public institutions of higher education. She has published structural descriptions of her interdisciplinary undergraduate programs to help address the confusion and settle the debate regarding the role of such interdisciplinary programs in undergraduate education.

Dr. Martin was a founding member of the Pennsylvania Consortium on Interdisciplinary Environmental Policy (PCIEP) and was co-author on a number of interdisciplinary sustainability publications for PCIEP (e.g., Pointing Pennsylvania Toward a Sustainable Future and Sustainability Indicators as a Communicative Tool). She also has served on the Executive Board of the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors (CEDD) and was co-chair of the CEDD Interdisciplinary Scholars Committee. Dr. Martin was co-author on the original CEDD publication Interdisciplinary Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure: Guidance for Individuals and Institutions and updated its chapter on Structural Considerations in its second edition. She is the co-author (with Stephanie Pfirman) of a chapter (Facilitating Interdisciplinary Scholars) in the recent Oxford Handbook on Interdisciplinarity.

• ensures we get ideas/views from people representing a diverse set of disciplines and backgrounds;
• mirrors a core thrust of the conference itself—the value of multiple perspectives;
• shares ownership and responsibility for running the conference sessions; and
• shares ownership and responsibility for the conference white paper.