Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy

Keynote Speakers:

Most definitions of interdisciplinarity focus on the integration of disciplinary perspectives but interdisciplinary courses and programs do not always achieve this goal. This lecture explores why by comparing and contrasting definitions of interdisciplinarity commonly found in the literature on undergraduate education with the understandings of college and university faculty who teach interdisciplinary courses. These contrasting examples reveal how different perspectives on interdisciplinarity (and disciplinarity) lead to different curricular and instructional choices. They also suggest key questions that instructors need to address as they develop interdisciplinary courses and programs. Among these: Does interdisciplinarity require the integration of disciplinary viewpoints? Can interdisciplinarity occur in the absence of a foundation of disciplinary knowledge? How should curricula and instruction promote the development of interdisciplinary competence? This lecture will not provide definitive answers, but will rather encourage instructors to think about how they would answer these questions - and about the implications of their answers for undergraduate education.

Dr. Lattuca studies the intersections of curriculum, teaching, student learning, and faculty work in higher education, addressing questions such as how faculty attitudes and behaviors related to curricular planning and instruction influence student learning in higher education, why and how faculty adopt new forms of knowledge production (e.g., interdisciplinary research), and how both disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives affect faculty work and student learning in colleges and universities. In her current research projects, Dr. Lattuca is exploring these topics in the context of undergraduate engineering programs. In addition, she is the author of Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching among College and University Faculty (2001), co-editor (with Elizabeth Creamer) of Advancing Faculty Learning through Interdisciplinary Collaboration (2005), and co-author (with Joan S. Stark) of Shaping the College Curriculum: Academic Plans in Context (2009).

A quiet but significant change is taking place in college and university teaching. Once practiced mostly in private, teaching in higher education has become more public. On campuses, in disciplinary and professional associations, among publishers and journal editors, there are growing numbers of face-to-face, print, and on-line forums in which faculty are presenting, critiquing, and building on each other's pedagogical work. While not yet large, this move towards a more studied, systematic approach to undergraduate instruction in higher education has recently gathered steam. This presentation will take up the question of what this all means for the transfer of pedagogical ideas and practices within and across disciplinary, institutional, and national lines. My subtitle borrows deliberately from John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's important book: The Social Life of Information (2002). Their point, briefly put, is that "information" and the "individuals" who produce and use it, "are inevitably and always part of rich social networks" (p.ix)-and that these networks are central to understanding why knowledge sometimes travels and sometimes does not.

Teaching Travels will start by looking at a couple of cases of classroom innovation--one that can stand for the old status quo, characterized by a culture of "pedagogical solitude" (Shulman 1993) and one that suggests what's possible in the more public pedagogical environments that are developing today. However, while the last twenty years have been marked by many important teaching initiatives that have greatly increased the sheer amount of pedagogical information "out there," its circulation cannot be taken for granted. So, the second part of this talk will look more closely at "demand," in particular at the kinds of communities that inform the pedagogical imagination of teachers. I'll focus on the disciplines first, but also on the emergence of "trading zones" (Galison 1997) between them. I will conclude with thoughts about what it might take to turn these often transitory trading zones into a genuine commons, which scholars treat as an integral part of what it means to be a teacher in higher education.

Mary Taylor Huber is senior scholar emerita and consulting scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She has directed Carnegie's roles in the Integrative Learning Project and the U.S. Professors of the Year Award, and has worked with Carnegie's scholarship of teaching and learning projects, including the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. A cultural anthropologist, Huber was involved in research at the Carnegie Foundation from 1985 to 2009, and has written widely on cultures of teaching in higher education. She is co-author of Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate (with Charles Glassick and Gene Maeroff, 1997). Recent books include Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (co-edited with Sherry Morreale, 2002), Balancing Acts: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers (2004), The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons (with Pat Hutchings, 2005), and special reports on "Integrative Learning: Mapping the Terrain" (with Pat Hutchings, 2004) and "The Promise of Faculty Inquiry for Teaching and Learning Basic Skills" from Carnegie's project on Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges (2008).

As an anthropologist, Mary Huber has also published on Catholic missionaries and colonial cultures in Papua New Guinea, including The Bishops' Progress: A Historical Ethnography of Catholic Missionary Experience on The Sepik Frontier (1988); Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice (co-edited with Nancy Lutkehaus, 1999); and Irony in Action: Anthropology, Practice, and the Moral Imagination (co-edited with James Fernandez, 2001).

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