COLA Interdisciplinary Program Instructors' Community of Practice

There are two main issues that this project hopes to address. The first is the student and instructor malaise that
has been noticed by educators and administrators across our whole campus since the return to face-to-face
instruction after the year-and-a-half of online instruction due to COVID-19. A phrase that I have heard used as shorthand for this issue by several colleagues is that students have “forgotten how to student.” This shorthand stands in for a range of challenges with student behavior that instructors have encountered in their classes at greater rates than prior to the pandemic. These challenges include communication skills deficits, interruptions in class participation due to mental health burdens, and inability to balance school attendance with other life commitments (e.g. necessary jobs, dependent family, difficult living and financial situations, etc.). Upon closer examination, however, this shorthand places an unfair amount of culpability on students for their response to circumstances beyond their control, and not enough responsibility on instructors for the fact that we have not fully figured out how to adapt to students' new needs. The second issue this project will address is the lack of community and sense of shared teaching goals among tenure track and professional track faculty in non-departmental interdisciplinary programs in the College of Liberal Arts (e.g. Human Dimensions of Organization, Health and Society, International Relations and Global Studies, Liberal Arts Honors). Faculty who teach in these programs are from multiple departments and disciplines, they may be new to UT or veteran instructors, they may be full or part time, and if the latter they may have other jobs on or off campus (e.g. one LAH instructor is on staff as an LAH undergrad advisor, another is the full-time director of the LBJ Library, another is a full-time lawyer). While the virtue of an interdisciplinary program is the variety of faculty experiences, instructional specialties, and courses that can be offered to students, its drawback is that it’s very easy for instructors to lose the thread of what makes the program cohesive. While students see a program as a set of coursework steps taken to fulfill requirements for a degree or certification, instructors might not even know other colleagues in their program or how their courses fit into these steps. In sum, it’s hard to have a shared sense of program identity if the faculty don’t have conversations and documentation about that identity. The key activity in this project is to organize, establish, and promote communities of practice for instructors in individual interdisciplinary programs in the College of Liberal Arts, and to do so with set of replicable procedures that can be transferred and adapted to teaching divisions throughout the university.