Making it All Count: A Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration Model Incorporating Scholarship, Creative Activity, and Student Engagement

This study takes a grounded theory approach as a basis for a case study examining a cross-disciplinary artistic and academic collaborative project involving faculty from the areas of English, music, dance, theatre, design, and visual journalism resulting in the creation of research, scholarly, and creative activity that fosters student engagement with feedback, reflection, and mentorship. An emergent conceptual model of artistic and academic collaboration was developed featuring a combination of collaborative partnership, creative process, and product dissemination with feedback and reflection leading to greater collaborative partnership as well as a new community of practice for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Using Student Perceptions of Collaborative Mapping to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Learning

This article reports on a study that investigated student perceptions of the effectiveness of collaborative mapping as a teaching strategy to facilitate interdisciplinary learning. Forty-five students enrolled in an introduction to interdisciplinary studies course participated in the study. Qualitative data, collaborative maps and student evaluations were analyzed using content and thematic analysis. Findings provide new understandings about using student perceptions of learning experiences to inform classroom practice. These understandings have implications for addressing the increasing pressure to demonstrate teaching effectiveness and learning outcomes in higher education.

Collaborative Pedagogy in a Design Thinking Education Course

This article describes a co-taught course that mobilized a Design Thinking approach in the service of creating a prototype for an actual girls’ boarding school in Kenya. The goal of the class was to allow students to engage collaboratively with faculty, with their peers, and with experts “on the ground” to develop the various parts of the school, from the mission to the curriculum to the building design. The article describes the rewards and complexities of this kind of hands-on pedagogy in a higher education context.

Fostering Student Awareness of Team Skills: A Participative Team Formation Process for Class Projects

This essay outlines a participative team formation process for class projects with resources to support instructors in implementing this process. This hybrid process, integrating self-selection and teacher assigned methods, includes four touch points that foster students’ awareness of effective team behaviors and the presence (or absence) of these behaviors within themselves and in team members. The awareness can provide students the foundation for developing team skills—beneficial in both team projects and in organizational teams.

Collaborative Autoethnography: Best Practices for Developing Group Projects

Collaborative Autoethnography (CAE) is an emerging practice that combines group interaction with qualitative research. Group projects are often deployed in course design to maximize the value of collaborative learning environments. Using existing scholarship, we describe best practices for group projects that apply principles of CAE. To advance the premise of the paper beyond descriptive summaries of pedagogical inquiry, we utilize a best practices mechanism to present a coherent guide for project collaborators to use in various classroom settings. The best practices proposed are research validated by existing CAE and project management literature.