Interdisciplinary teaching in collaboration with Planet Forward, GWU

  • Dodd, Rachel (PI)

Project: Other

Project Details

Description

The Collaboration Project, is a great example of our Future Facing Learning Curriculum Development and Teaching Excellence in practice where we have redesigned our UG framework to embrace Interdisciplinary teaching (where shared modules are interspersed with subject-specific modules). The main elements of this are:
• Concentrated teaching delivery: delivering teaching in concentrated sessions, in this case on Tuesdays and Thursdays only, for our L4 / first year students, delivering 60 credits per semester in 1 x 20 credit module over 5 weeks and 1 x 40 credit module over 12 weeks. This leaves students Friday, Sat, Sun and Monday for paid / unpaid working or family commitments.
• Structured check in points: Creating a 3-phased delivery model, which embeds formative assessment (or check in points, as we like to call them) at regular phases in our teaching schedule, for example weeks 4, 8 and 12.
This module is delivered across eleven disciplines*, with a total of 137 students who are each together for full days 10-5pm each Tuesdays for five consecutive weeks. This framework has been used for an module in Semester 1 and again in Semester 2 (for the same group of students. They also focus on a subject specific module (Comics, Journalism etc.) on Thursdays for weeks 1-5 and then Tuesday and Thursdays from weeks 7-12.
Classrooms – During the first hour all students are briefed together in a lecture theatre and then head into subject studio spaces – sometimes sharing spaces with 1 or 2 other disciplines, so 6 or 7 studios have been used from 11-5pm in various ways to facilitate subject or group collaborations. The brief of the module is this: Collaboration is a key aspect of creative practice, this module enables students to develop their team-working, communication, project management, negotiation skills, in order to develop their ability to effectively collaborate. Students will put these skills into practice by exploring a small-scale creative project, students will apply their discipline specific skills and creative practice, working together in small groups to respond to a subject specific brief.


*Disciplines: Comics and Graphic Novels, Fashion, Film and Television Production, Fine Art, Graphic Design, Illustration, Interior Design, Journalism, Music Production, Photography, Sports Journalism.

Our recent symposium on Connected University https://blogs.tees.ac.uk/lteonline/ltexchange/ltexchange-symposia-series/
Our strategy https://www.tees.ac.uk/docs/docrepo/about/teesside_2027.pdf
Advance HE blog – collaboration with Adobe

Layman's description

How to develop workplace ready collaboration skills across different subject areas (Comics and Graphic Novels, Fashion, Film and Television Production, Fine Art, Graphic Design, Illustration, Interior Design, Journalism, Music Production, Photography, Sports Journalism.)

Key findings

Pushing students out of their comfort zones causes great outcomes, with some expected challenges.
Short titleInterdisciplinary teaching and learning
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date25/09/2317/04/24

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