TEAM-TEACHING AS A PROMISING PATHWAY TOWARD INTERDISCIPLINARY SUSTAINABILITY COMPETENCY DEVELOPMENT

This study focused on sustainability competency development for students in a 3-week field course "Energy and the Environment". The course is team-taught by two University of Michigan faculty, one with a PhD in geosciences and one with a PhD in ecology. Students in the class visited energy production facilities including a coal mine, coal-fired power plant equipped with carbon capture, a uranium mine, a utility-scale wind farm, a utility-scale solar farm, and a hydroelectric facility. Students engaged with community stakeholders at the local, state and national levels to discuss the relationships among economics, energy, geology, environmental justice, and policy. Through a qualitative, interview-based inquiry on students’ learning in this team-taught field course, our team explored how team-taught interdisciplinary courses facilitate students’ development as leaders in energy resource sustainability. We conducted pre- and post-course interviews of nine undergraduate student participants and the two faculty co-instructors for the course. The students self-identified as seven women and two men, ranging in age from 18 to 21 years. Six students were White, two were Asian/Asian American, and one was Black; the co-instructors were White men. To develop our findings, all interviews were subjected to a process of qualitative coding to derive themes, which we present with rich data from participants’ verbatim quotes. Findings revealed that constructivist-informed interdisciplinary instruction by the teaching team deepened students’ understandings of the importance of the knowledge of both energy science and policy, helping them to become holistically informed on critical issues in energy resource sustainability. Further, students recognized that an integrated understanding of these bodies of knowledge was critical to writing energy resource policy memos that constituted the central learning/assessment activity of the course. The kind of literacy afforded to the students through the team-teaching endeavor is foundational to students’ development as climate leaders. We suggest that this mode of teaching may represent an effective teaching enhancement for preparing energy sustainability and climate change leaders at the University of Michigan, other US institutions and internationally.