Modeling Lifelong Learning: Collaborative Teaching across Disciplinary Lines

Most courses in colleges and universities are taught by only one instructor. This is often necessitated by the financial exigencies of educational institutions, but is also due to an academic tradition in which the ideal is a single expert teaching in a single discipline. The rapidly changing realities of both the higher education and job markets, however, have called the traditional ideal into question. Interdisciplinary collaborative teaching is one way to adapt to the needs of twenty-first-century students, by modeling lifelong learning for students and inviting instructors to be more deliberately reflective about disciplinary assumptions, learning styles, and pedagogies.