Northern Illinois University Local Learning Community
Location: DeKalb, Illinois
Institution type: Public research university
Undergraduate enrollment: 11,429
Postgraduate enrollment: 4,220
Participating faculty in:
- Anthropology
- Art and Design
- Engineering Technology
- Entrepreneurship
- Health Studies
- Managment
- Mechanical Engineering
- Public Health
- Statistics and Actuarial Science
Jump to: Motivation | Approaches | Challenges | Outcomes
The NIU Local Learning Community (LLC) aims to foster collaboration and facilitate partnerships among faculty across multiple colleges and institutes to develop novel transdisciplinary curricula that is integrated into the disciplines within the humanities, sciences, engineering, and business curricula. The LLC successfully facilitated curricular collaboration, resulting in several ongoing transdisciplinary teaching and research projects. Increased faculty participation and the development of new transdisciplinary curricula reveals both enthusiasm and institutional support for this decentralized, faculty-driven approach.
Motivation
The aim of the NIU LLC was to create a support network for faculty collaboration across multiple colleges and academic disciplines, including engineering, entrepreneurship, strategic management, marketing, anthropology, economics, geology, public health and mathematics. For the past two decades, Northern Illinois University has focused on building interdisciplinary learning across the curriculum and research protocols, but there have been challenges in developing sustainable mechanisms for achieving these strategic goals. Bringing faculty together using a self-selected, grassroots model and a shared interest in sustainability, the NIU LLC has become a channel for motivated faculty to collaboratively design and create transdisciplinary curricula and interdisciplinary research projects.
Approaches
The NIU LLC full meetings occurred once a semester, with interim small groups meetings taking place on an as needed basis. While portions of the meetings entailed formal communications from the PIs, most of the meeting time was utilized to share experiences, challenges and best practices in deploying and integrating the transdisciplinary modules in individual classes. 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. Many faculty across disciplines met one-on-one and visiting classrooms to share expertise and illustrate alternative delivery mechanisms (e.g., virtual, in-person, hybrid). Individual faculty also developed research and teaching projects around transdisciplinary learning.
Challenges
The main challenge for any "optional" activities in academia is faculty time. We were able to overcome some of these challenges by developing flexibility into the meetings, including mixing virtual and in-person meetings, varying the timing of the meetings, and hosting multiple meetings within each semester to accommodate a wide variety of teaching schedules. The in-person meetings included meals and snacks to foster both formal and informal conversations with a "getting to know you" atmosphere. While it was rare to have all of the faculty attend every session, offering these multiple types of sessions allowed for novel research and teaching collaborations which has resulted in publications and additional grants.
Outcomes
As revealed in both published and forthcoming articles, the BASICS approach has had clear impacts on both student and faculty learning. Anecdotal evidence suggests indicators of institutional change, consistent with our goals of the LLC. Due to COVID and lack of travel, we were able to open up this transdisciplinary experience to additional faculty. The ease of recruitment for Cohorts 3 and 4 indicates a deep bench of faculty interested in engaging in transdisciplinary work around wicked problems. Furthermore, as the PIs presented the approach and results of our approach, there was interest from multiple divisions within the university, including Academic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Academic Affairs. 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.