TY - JOUR
T1 - Interdisciplinarity in design education
T2 - understanding the undergraduate student experience
AU - Self, James A.
AU - Baek, Joon Sang
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
Copyright:
Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/9/1
Y1 - 2017/9/1
N2 - Interdisciplinarity is becoming a critical issue of concern for design schools across East Asia in their attempts to provide industry graduates with the skills and competences to make creative contributions in a global economy. As a result, East Asian higher education institutions are aggressively endeavouring to provide interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum that combine traditional designerly skills with engineering knowledge and methods. The current study takes an interdisciplinary undergraduate course as case-study to examine how the pedagogic strategy of team teaching influences student learning experience. Two surveys of student learning were conducted for this research purpose. The first provided an indication of the holistic student learning experience, while the second explored the conditions of team and non-team teaching as influence upon learning experiences specifically. Results showed how students taught by a single instructor provided a more positive overall opinion of course quality and experienced significantly more encouragement to participate compared to team taught respondents. However, findings also indicated how team teaching significantly increased the students’ experience of a balanced contribution from different disciplinary perspectives and how the team teaching approach was significantly more effective in providing students with greater opportunities to understand the relevance of the different disciplines to the course subject. We conclude with a discussion of results in terms of the effective use of team teaching at undergraduate level as strategy for interdisciplinary learning experiences.
AB - Interdisciplinarity is becoming a critical issue of concern for design schools across East Asia in their attempts to provide industry graduates with the skills and competences to make creative contributions in a global economy. As a result, East Asian higher education institutions are aggressively endeavouring to provide interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum that combine traditional designerly skills with engineering knowledge and methods. The current study takes an interdisciplinary undergraduate course as case-study to examine how the pedagogic strategy of team teaching influences student learning experience. Two surveys of student learning were conducted for this research purpose. The first provided an indication of the holistic student learning experience, while the second explored the conditions of team and non-team teaching as influence upon learning experiences specifically. Results showed how students taught by a single instructor provided a more positive overall opinion of course quality and experienced significantly more encouragement to participate compared to team taught respondents. However, findings also indicated how team teaching significantly increased the students’ experience of a balanced contribution from different disciplinary perspectives and how the team teaching approach was significantly more effective in providing students with greater opportunities to understand the relevance of the different disciplines to the course subject. We conclude with a discussion of results in terms of the effective use of team teaching at undergraduate level as strategy for interdisciplinary learning experiences.
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U2 - 10.1007/s10798-016-9355-2
DO - 10.1007/s10798-016-9355-2
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84955615694
VL - 27
SP - 459
EP - 480
JO - International Journal of Technology and Design Education
JF - International Journal of Technology and Design Education
SN - 0957-7572
IS - 3
ER -