Book Review: Interdisciplinary Courses and Team Teaching: New Arrangements for Learning
James R. Davis. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1995.
Reviewed by Willie Young, former Graduate Student Associate, TRC and Department of Religious Studies

Interdisciplinary Courses takes a realistic, practical approach to the challenges and importance of interdisciplinary team teaching. Throughout, Davis clarifies the broad goals of team-teaching efforts and documents the specific practices required to achieve them. Team teaching is especially well suited to developing synthetic thinking skills and adopting multiple perspectives on specific issues and less effective for delivering a fixed mass of content. These complex pedagogical goals require new methods of organization, evaluation, and interaction among faculty. For instance, if an interdisciplinary course seeks to teach synthesis of material, alternative assessment methods such as group work or visual representations may be more appropriate than standard evaluation methods.

Interdisciplinary Courses documents several courses at the University of Denver that serve as concrete examples of the collaboration, planning, and integration that make team teaching successful. Ranging across the academic spectrum, these examples ground Davis' discussion of problems encountered in designing and implementing courses and provide guidance for others. Equally importantly, while Davis makes a broad argument for the importance of teaching complex methods of reflection, the examples demonstrate clearly how learning objectives and means of assessment vary across disciplines or between professional schools.

Linking institutional structure and disciplinary specialization, Davis explains the difficulties in shifting to a team-teaching approach. Chronicling the rise of research institutions, Davis narrates how professors became royalty in their own classrooms, very often isolated from colleagues in their teaching and focused solely upon their research specializations. Institutional momentum toward "traditional" (i.e., specialized) teaching thus works against team teaching, which is viewed as a distraction from one's own work, too time-intensive, or otherwise not suiting traditional university expectations. Moreover, institutional structures shape professorial interaction; Davis discusses faculty's fears of having other instructors in their classroom-or the common experience of not knowing what to do when in someone else's classroom: "The classroom is the professor's castle, buttressed to some extent by the rhetoric of academic freedom, and encircled by the wide moat of specialization" (p. 33). Davis' focus on the university setting demonstrates how interdis-ciplinary teaching requires sea changes in teaching practice, both in terms of individual focus and institutional expectations.

Davis' book is immensely helpful, especially to those experimenting with interdisciplinary teaching. Even for those teaching within specific disciplines, team teaching provides an illuminating contrast to more traditional teaching methods that can help all teachers to reflect upon and clarify the goals of their teaching and their means of assessing and achieving these outcomes. The primary weakness with Davis' argument is his emphasis upon the integrative, holistic value of interdisciplinary teaching. While relations between teachers must be amicable for successful team teaching, I am less certain that the methods and course content must fit together as neatly. Contrasts between disciplines, and the incommensurability of their analyses, may be equally valuable for students' intellectual development. That said, Davis' account of the goals and workings of team teaching can be a helpful guide when exploring interdisciplinary and team teaching.