STRENGTHENING SCIENCE TEACHING THROUGH AN INTERDISCIPLINARY FACULTY TEAM

Pedagogic practice in the Northeastern Illinois University program in Earth Science has undergone major change in the past three years. NEIU is a state-supported public university serving about 12,000 students in Chicago. In an effort to strengthen teaching in the physical sciences, ten faculty representing Earth Science, Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics formed a group to focus on innovative and effective teaching strategies. After three years, the group has become a team of mutually-supportive colleagues who challenge and help each other to continually improve our teaching. Funded by NASA and UNCF Special Programs, the project structure involved frequent team meetings, reciprocal classroom visitations between colleagues, development of curricular materials related to space science, and faculty development workshops.

Critical components for success with our team of introverts included engaging an extrovert as project director and having an initial team retreat. Through this weekend of team-building exercises, we developed our vision, shared values, got to know each other, and began to develop trust and acceptance. Team meetings have at times focused on specific issues, such as sharing time management techniques or “best practice” classroom methods; others were more broad-based, involving reassessing project priorities and long-term goals. Major challenges included surmounting fears about visitors to our classrooms, conquering inertia, and acquiring skills at web page publishing.

The outcomes of the project include a series of web-based curriculum modules – some explicitly interdisciplinary, others more narrow in focus; all, however, find utility across disciplines. These aim to creatively infuse space science concepts into a core curriculum of the target subjects. Curriculum modules currently on-line include: Volcanoes; Earthquakes (exploring earthquakes and volcanoes relative to tectonic environments); Meteorites; Mining the Moon; and Tides.

An important consequence of the project: the team has set as a priority to continue our team meetings, reciprocal visits, and cooperation in developing interdisciplinary course materials. We are currently in the process of adding NASA certification to handle lunar and meteorite materials, in order to bring these concepts to life in the classroom.