Clusters’ Contribution to Faculty Development

While clusters offer opportunities for a team-taught approach, even without that merger of time and energy, they suggest other ways to remove real and perceived barriers between faculty, divisions and departments, schools and programs. CGS’s recent decision to include the freshman elective in its fall semester brings this fluidity into its interdisciplinary team-structured curriculum. CAS’s timeline for its First-Year Experience includes soliciting proposals for freshmen seminars and learning communities that link courses and that tie courses to residential programs. Deans and Chairs throughout the University must encourage—even require—that faculty adapt existing courses to include flexible assignments that explore meaningful applicability to real-life situations and thus help dissolve the barriers between the classroom and the community outside the classroom, between coursework and intern and volunteer experience. As an additional and significant consequence, clusters would promote an invigorated academic advising, since advisors would know about and promote more across-the-discipline approaches to fulfill requirements within major areas of study.

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