INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND TEAM TEACHING.

In the spring of 1974, a group of eight experimental courses, called the Man Series, was instituted at Purdue for the purpose of improving the social dimensions of engineering education. Each course was team taught by a faculty team made up of at least one person from one of the Schools of Engineering and at least one person from some other school within the University. The classes were truly interdisciplinary - putting together in the same classroom, at the same time faculty from engineering, philosophy, economics, fine arts, sociology, biology, political science, agriculture and industrial management in various combinations. In this way, non-technical perspectives could be incorporated into the problem solving process which is the fundamental characteristic of the engineering profession.