Presenter: Mona Wells (Environmental Science)
Key words: Faculty interdisciplinary networking, Concept mapping
Interdisciplinarity, as it informs knowledge creation and knowledge integration, is a central issue in education and life-long learning and is also
crucial in supporting the future development of research-led teaching. A group of XJTLU faculty and international facilitators have been working on a project, one objective of which is to investigate ways to stimulate faculty-interdisciplinary networking in both teaching and research. The core methodology of the project is concept mapping, which may be used as a visual approach to structuring knowledge and understanding the progression of how learned concepts are integrated. This presentation will provide an overview of preliminary results and will focus on the faculty side of our pedagogical research. We have found, as pre-anticipated, that concept mapping is user-friendly, practical for implementation, and a valuable tool for the future development of interdisciplinary content-based teaching initiatives. In contrast, our approach has been less valuable in the area of stimulating interdisciplinary research, though not due to shortcomings of the approach itself. We find that, for both education and research, other developmental challenges are limiting factors. Our findings may be useful to consider in the context of ten-year strategic planning for instructional technology and research policy.
*This is a Teaching Development Fund project
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