Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning workshop on Interdisciplinary teaching at the occasion of Sheridan Center's 20th anniversary conference on Saturday November 3. Sue Alcock and Ömür Harmansah.
Interdisciplinarity
- Abandoning established "authoritative disciplinary canons"; dissolving disciplinary walls, interrogating disciplinary geneaologies and opening fields to supra-disciplinary/post-disciplinary discourses.
- Speaking to non-disciplinary fields, fields of research that are cross-cutting multiple disciplines, such as visual culture studies, science studies, material culture studies, cultural studies, ethnohistory.
- Working with cross-disciplinary concepts like representation, space, body, technology, agency, ideology, gender etc., abandoning the disciplinary "jargons" hostile to cross-disciplinary dialogue.
- Teaching thematic courses that bring interdisciplinary discourses and fields into classroom, rather than strictly chronological "surveys" of canonical material.
- Architecture Body and Performance in the Ancient Near Eastern World - Ömür Harmansah
- Things! The Material Worlds of Humanity -Chris Witmore
- Reading assignments outside disciplinary norms: actually, readings that deconstruct those norms, even better! (i.e. assigning Michel Foucault whenever possible).
- The Rise (and Demise) of the State in the Near East - Ömür Harmansah
- Collaborative teaching: good and bad examples.
- Artist visits to archaeology classes at Reed College.
- Course wikis, creative assignments and Project-based learning.
- City and Festival: Cult Practices and Architectural Production in the Ancient Near East assignment Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
- Ethnography of space and place at Reed College campus
Resources
- Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences.
- Penn Pilot Curriculum: "to introduce [students] to broad interdisciplinary areas of human knowledge"
Michel Foucault (285 rue de Vaugirard, Paris, 1975), who interrogated disciplinary geneaologies in the social sciences and humanities. Image Source.
