Bentley University Local Learning Community
Location: Waltham, Massachusetts
Institution type: Private university
Undergraduate enrollment: 3,996 (Fall 2021)
Postgraduate enrollment: 1,445 (Fall 2021)
Participating faculty in:
- Accounting
- Business
- Economics
- Experience Design
- Computer Information Systems
- Management
- Marketing
- Mathematical Sciences
- Natural and Applied Sciences
- Sociology
Jump to: Motivation | Approaches | Challenges | Outcomes
The Bentley Local Learning Community (LLC) aims to foster collaboration among faculty from 16 academic departments to create transdisciplinary curricula that integrate the humanities and sciences into the Bentley undergraduate business curriculum. Despite challenges like limited faculty time, the LLC successfully facilitated collaboration among faculty in every department, resulting in several ongoing transdisciplinary teaching projects and research publications. The impact includes increased faculty participation and the development of new transdisciplinary curricula, indicating both enthusiasm and institutional support for this decentralized, faculty-driven approach.
Motivation
The goal of the Bentley LLC was to provide a way to support faculty collaboration across 16 different academic departments – eight (8) business and eight (8) arts & sciences. For the last two decades, Bentley aimed to intentionally integrate the humanities and sciences into the undergraduate business curriculum at Bentley, but hadn't found sustainable mechanisms for doing it. By bringing faculty together using a more self-selected, grassroots model and a shared interest in sustainability, the Bentley LLC offered a vehicle for motivated faculty to collaboratively design and create transdisciplinary curricula.
Approaches
Bentley LLC meetings typically occur once a semester (sometimes more often, when faculty cohorts were in the process of deploying curriculum modules). While there was some formal guidance from PIs, many of the meetings focused on sharing experiences and best practices in deploying the transdisciplinary modules. Faculty in the LLC were also invited, and encouraged, to communicate with one another outside of the formal LLC meetings to engage in cross-disciplinary learning. For example, at least one faculty member from a business department invited another with a science background to help teach part of the curriculum module in class. Also, faculty from different cohorts would communicate one-on-one to learn how one might implement these modules in a Bentley class.
Challenges
Like all "optional" activities in academia, the single biggest challenge to meeting frequency (and growth of the LLC) is faculty time. We've overcome some of these challenges using hybrid platforms (Zoom) and incentivizing faculty attendance with opportunities to share a meal or snacks, providing flexibility in timing over different class blocks, and creating more opportunities for collaborative scholarship – i.e., multidisciplinary teams publishing manuscripts in disciplinary or interdisciplinary teaching journals. We have several such manuscripts in process at Bentley among teams that have not published together in the past.
Outcomes
With respect to student and faculty learning, it's clear that the BASICS approach has had an impact on both, based on published and forthcoming articles from the project. The institutional change is a bit harder to measure, but we do have anecdotal evidence that we are meeting the goals of the LLC. We have a deep bench of faculty that WANT to do this kind of work. PI Szymanski, for example, is leading two teams of business and A&S faculty to design transdisciplinary curricula focused on other Wicked Problems – such as those in artificial intelligence and global health – in an AY 2024-25 Presidential Fellowship. The twelve faculty members solicited for participation all willingly accepted, which we interpret as a sign of enthusiasm to participate in the BASICS model. None of these faculty members had been directly involved in the LLC, but are now part of the network. This is also a sign of administrative and institutional support for a curriculum design program that is faculty-driven and decentralized with respect to pedagogy and scholarship in teaching and learning, yet still affiliated with college units, such as the Badavas Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning.