Author(s):
Innovation requires a transdisciplinary approach, yet higher education institutions often operate within silos. To address this challenge, we created the Mission, Meaning, Making (M3) program to encourage transdisciplinary learning among all college students, regardless of their major or background. The program brings together the engineering/technology, liberal arts, and business colleges to create a transformative undergraduate experience within a research-intensive university. The program includes a sequence of design and innovation coursework that involves cross-college co-teaching (two instructors from different colleges, teaching in the same room at the same time) to create a community to nourish student innovative ideas over multiple semesters. The M3 program has been successful, as evidenced by the number of innovation challenges/grants won by students and the transformation of their ideas into tangible solutions for people. While the teaching of design and innovation is not novel in itself, providing a way to teach collaboratively across colleges within large universities can be of benefit when reaching toward more transformative, innovative, and potentially more valuable learning experiences for students. Disciplinary structures and systems within universities today, while not all bad, make curriculum approvals and instructor assignments across academic units difficult. To address the difficulties related to transdisciplinary education, research was conducted with the M3 program to establish a model for disciplines to more easily converge at the undergraduate level. Join this lightning talk to explore the lessons learned from this project and to consider ways to improve STEM education through institutional transformation in pursuit of innovative programming.
Coauthors
Sherri Briller sbriller@purdue.edu
