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Document 2004-1110

Application of Team Teaching Concepts in an Integr ated Science and Technology Pr ogr am O. Geoffrey Egekwu#, Prince N. Anyalebechi*

#College of Integrated Science & Technology James Madison University

*Padnos School of Engineering Grand Valley State University

Abstr act

A unique baccalaureate degree program called Integrated Science and Technology (ISAT) was developed at James Madison University in the early 1990's in response to industry need for university graduates with a broad knowledge of science and technology and excellent analytical and problem-solving skills. The goal was to produce university graduates with the ability to manage a broad range of technologies and solve science, technology and engineering related problems. A second important goal was to attract and retain students, including minorities, who ordinarily would not have selected an engineering program. Accomplishing both goals from a pedagogical viewpoint required a paradigm shift in the way science and engineering courses are traditionally taught in universities. It required the design of interdisciplinary courses with careful and deliberate integration of concepts from a broad range of disciplines of engineering science and technology. These courses were such that they involved more than one faculty and therefore required some form of team teaching. In this paper, we discuss some of the merits and demerits of the team teaching concepts that have been employed in some of the ISAT courses.

1. Intr oduction

The call for reform in the scholarship and teaching of science and technology has been part of the public debate on improving education in general, and in particular, in the effort to attract and retain engineering students. One of the common recommendations made by the early reformers is that the academy must make a conscious effort to prepare engineering students in the "overlapping neighborhoods" of engineering disciplines. [1] The danger, Boyer and others warned, is that "specialization, without broader perspective, risks pedantry". He further argued that "no human capacity is great enough to permit a vision of the world as simple, but if the educator does not aim at the vision (of interdisciplinary education) no one else will." A lot of universities responded to this call by developing and

Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright 2004, American Society for Engineering Education

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Egekwu, O. G., & Anyalebechi, P. (2004, June), Application Of Team Teaching Concepts In An Integrated Science And Technology Program Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--12774