Team Teaching Program

About the ICS Team-Taught Course Initiative

In addition to supporting interdisciplinary programming and curricular redevelopment, we believe that ICS clusters ought to have an important role in developing innovative pedagogy and curriculum. In order to encourage ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration, regularly participating members of ICS clusters will be eligible to apply for financial support to co-teach a class. The team-teaching application is open to anyone in the University, but each application/proposal must be clearly connected to either a) an existing ICS cluster or b) a new cluster being proposed.

The goal of this program is to support ongoing efforts to reimagine existing courses and curricula to be more interdisciplinary, extending the intellectual work of clusters. We hope this program will serve student learning by modeling how different fields, using various methodologies, approach a topic or issue. This program aims to contribute to creating a more innovative, integrated, and interdisciplinary curriculum across BGSU’s campus. Proposals that help build relationships among units (as opposed to among individual faculty) are particularly encouraged.

Each year, up to TWO distinct team-taught courses will be supported, usually one per semester. Each funded team-taught course will allow two faculty members, from separate units, to co-teach a single course at regular enrolment levels, at full pay (and in load), during the regular Academic Year (Fall or Spring semesters only).

This would require: 

• Up to two faculty members (one from each team-teaching pair) to be bought out for one course each. The College of Arts and Sciences has agreed to provide replacement costs up to a maximum $5,000 per year. The other member of each team would have their usual teaching load, with one of the courses being the team-taught course.
• The team-taught course would have a relatively small course enrollment, consistent with comparable courses in the participating units
• Enrollments should be fairly evenly split between the participating faculty members’ home units, i.e., by reserving 12 seats for ART majors and 12 seats for HIST students in a course capped at 24.
• Students would be enrolled in AS 3000 Seminar in A&S, a new ICS 3000 course number (pending approval from A&S), or an existing course number through the participating unit(s). Students enrolled in the team-taught course must be given course credit toward their major, such as by granting a course substitution for an existing required course.

Applicants may be from two different units within a single department or School, providing they have significantly different disciplinary or methodological approaches and different student populations (for example, Creative Writing and Literature majors within the English department). We encourage proposals that build collaborations across different segments of the College of Arts and Sciences that rarely interact, such as between the arts and the social sciences, or between the humanities and the physical sciences. 

Priority will be given to proposals that:

• demonstrate a cluster's ongoing commitment to interdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary teaching build on existing resources or ongoing interdisciplinary efforts, such as by including other Cluster participants as visiting lecturers and requiring student attendance at Cluster events
• meaningfully and purposefully bring together student populations, disciplines, and/or methodologies that might not often interact
• emphasize innovative, interdisciplinary processes that disrupt conventional approaches to teaching the subject matter
• develop resources, tools, assignments, or activities to support or encourage further interdisciplinary collaborations.

Proposals due in Fall will be for courses offered in Spring of the next AY (18 months later), to allow for adequate planning time and coordination with affected units, including recruiting students to register for the team-taught course and ensuring they receive credit toward the major.

In exchange for this funding, team-teachers accept the following responsibilities:

• To collect syllabi, samples of student work, examples of class activities, student reflection essays, and/or other assessment tools to be able to provide concrete advice for future groups. These groups should offer models of interdisciplinary teaching without prescriptive policies to limit future projects.
• To present on their experience at a workshop organized by ICS (possibly at the annual CFE Teaching and Learning Summit).
• To submit a report with documentation (including syllabus, key assignments, and sample student work) to ICS within 30 days of the completion of the course. These documents will be made available on the ICS ScholarWorks website to serve as a resource, reference, and source of inspiration for further pedagogical and curricular innovations. For the purposes of BGSU merit and promotion, ICS considers this work to be equivalent to a publication.
• Upon completion of these conditions, the ICS Director will provide a letter of support, to be used in merit and promotion dossiers, that recognizes the instructors’ pedagogical innovations and curricular leadership.