By Dan Albert
Department of History

Interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching has a fairly sound footing on many college and university campuses where this or that institute, “studies” department, or entire school is dedicated not to the tools and techniques of a traditional discipline but to answering a particular question of immediate and practical interest. The humanities contribute usefully to these endeavors, as when historians of science inform policy decisions on bioethics or scholars of literature contribute to a deeper understanding of the effects of immigration policy on the lived experience of immigrants themselves and thereby empower immigrant communities to shape that policy.

Humanistic scholarship adds importantly to these debates, of course, because of its transcendent concerns–its preoccupation with the big questions not bounded by time and place, by society or culture. Yet the danger always lurks that by trying to make ourselves useful by reaching outside the disciplinary boundaries within and around the humanities, we compromise the very thing that we are trying to contribute.

Philosopher of technology Langdon Winner worried over this in his essay “Brandy, Cigars, and Human Values.” Often asked to play the role of “values expert” in discussions about the role of technology in society, Winner reminds us that humanistic scholarship has a larger purpose than the workaday world. “The inquiry we need,” he concludes, is “a project of redemption that can and ought to include everyone.” His conclusion at once captures the humanities faculty’s insecurities about our lack of specialized knowledge of how to make money, cure the sick, or educate the next generation, and reminds us that our purpose is indeed higher, nothing short of redemption for all.

“Are not all my musings about technology just ambient chit chat for scientists and engineers to consider around the fireside after a hard day in the lab?” he asked.¹

For Salem State faculty the walls between the School of Arts and Sciences, the Bertolon School of Business, and the Schools of Human Services are doubly high. There is the fundamental question of goals. When Jude Nixon, Salem State’s newly minted Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, reminded students at the September 2009 convocation that “A college degree can enable you, can free you, can liberate you, especially your mind,” he was not referring to classes in the Schools of Human Services , useful as he admitted they are to landing a good-paying job. There are also the practical concerns we all have in a time of change. If the college begins a review of the core curriculum requirements at Salem State, won’t Human Services poach the left side of the flow sheet?….etc.

One way to cut holes in this wall between these two ideas of education, between the immediately important and the deeply important, is to remind ourselves what all Salem State faculty have in common: a curious dedication to teaching and learning. If we cannot yet come together on bedrock goals and values, we can certainly come together in the search for the tools and techniques that improve teaching and learning for students. That may be the most important lesson yet gained from a nascent research project by Salem State faculty into the usefulness of so-called Team Based Learning.

Through the dog days of summer, faculty from all three schools came together to consider a simple question: Does the pedagogical method of Team Based Learning (TBL) improve learning outcomes for students and teaching satisfaction for faculty? The TBL method involves inverting the standard learning sequence by making teams of students responsible for the initial engagement with the material, empowering them to shape the assessment program for the class, and insisting that they work together to achieve the higher-level learning for the course. The instructor moves from lecturing to orchestrating the simultaneous reporting of team projects.

Although many of us have used a variety of group and team work in our teaching over the years, by all agreeing to test carefully the claims of a comprehensive pedagogical system of Team Based Learning, we have begun to open a dialogue that reaches from our common ground as teachers out to Political Science, History, Business and Finance, Education, Sport & Movement Science, Chemistry, Biology, and Geography.

There is little agreement among the participants. For the Bertolon faculty, teamwork is a matter of faith, demanded by the corporate and entrepreneurial environments for which students are being prepared. For faculty in the sciences, surrendering the lecture can be uncomfortable; for arts and sciences faculty, basing the individual, life-changing journey that is college on teamwork seems suspect. But all of us agree on two things: TBL seems to improve student engagement, and the grand claims of TBL promoters are as yet unproven in any scientifically valid way.

So on this we can agree, and on this we can begin to work together. This multi-year investigation will not necessarily lead to teaching a class in “The Business of World History” or “The Politics of Aquatic Management.” But absent this kind of collaborative research into areas of common concern, we will remain apart and even perhaps at odds.

This essay is part of ASpect’s December 2009 issue on interdisciplinarity.

The essay can be found in Langdon Winner’s collection The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1986).