Association for Interdisciplinary Studies Conference: Baltimore October 2017

About a week ago, I flew to Baltimore to attend the international conference on interdisciplinary studies organized by AIS (AIS Conference) - it was an incredibly busy and informative and helpful three-day-event consisting of presentations and conversations with dozens of people who think along similar lines, in term of research and pedagogy, as I do.

Last year, attending the conference was all about gathering input and information - I had just started the program at Coker, and mostly I wanted to make sure we were on the right track in terms of expectations and offerings, and it turned out we were! The Coker IS major is slightly more demanding and defined than what some other US colleges and universities offer, but it is also very small (this makes us flexible, or "nimble," as we say in academia) and therefore personalized.

So, last year I was primarily a listener, but this year I could also be a contributor - I shared information about the process of creating and developing the interdisciplinary major at Coker, the courses we include, the collaborations with other faculty and with administration, and our success graduating the first cohort of students last spring.  (I also showed off the fabulous Coker College campus, which was in my bag in form of a folder. Thanks, MarCom! "... and that's my office window!")

What sets the AIS conference apart from all other conferences I have attended (and I have been at this for a while!) is the genuine dedication to sharing experiences and advice with everyone, regardless of time-in-the-game or home institution. I learned about electronic portfolios, reflective writing prompts, creative capstone projects, and ways to reach out to colleagues across campus - and at one time, when I responded to an interdisciplinarian from NYU Gallatin who was looking for ways to integrate interdisciplinary work sooner in the undergraduate experience (I suggested getting the first-year-writing instructors on board, which apparently would be impossible in a large university setting - but at Coker, all it takes is a text to Margaret Godbey), I heard the words: "I envy you for where you teach." That was sort of nice.

So here are my three take-aways from the AIS conference:

• Create e-portfolios with my IS200 students in the spring, keep them going over their junior year, and mesh them with linkedin profiles in the IS400 course in preparation for graduation.
• Band together with fellow Coker professors across disciplines for an Interdisciplinary Interest Cluster (Craig Pepin, interdisciplinarian at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, generously shared his reading list).
• Take students camping! Actually, that's meant to read: Recreate an interdisciplinary Evergreen State College course titled "Seeing What's There" that combines looking at (and experiencing) landscapes with creative work. Check it out on my blog post from 10/15 - with photos!

Hold me to them! And feel free to collaborate on any of these - because, seriously, interdisciplinary work depends on working with each other. On pretty much everything.

The Evergreen State College: Coming into Interdisciplinary Studies

 This weekend, I went to the beach to clear my mind. It turns out that when you are at the beach, you don't stop thinking; you just think differently. Your mind is at leisure to wander. The sky, the pelicans, the sand, the shells - I saw what was there.

I remembered learning how to "see" - my first explorations into interdisciplinarity at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where I earned my undergraduate degree in a loosely-defined field of studies (languages, literatures, cultures?) in 1991. Evergreen provides a radical form of education, one that, from the first introductory two-quarter-long "program" (a set of courses encompassing four fields, co-taught by four professors in lectures and seminars), emphasizes connections and interrelations of disciplines. It also puts the student in control of his or her studies, something I appreciated. It was transformative: for the first time in many years, education and learning made sense to me. It was actually a lucky hit - I had no idea just how different Evergreen was from other colleges.

In the Spring of 1990, I signed up for a program titled "Seeing What's There" co-taught by my mentor Pete Sinclair (Chaucerian, writer, former mountaineer and Ranger) and his colleague Mark Levinsky (philosopher). On weekends, we traveled across the state of Washington and saw what was there. We climbed Mt. St. Helens; we hiked along a Pacific Ocean beach; we drove far into the desert of Eastern Washington. We kept very uptight naturalist's field journals according to a strict method established by Joseph Grinnell. (I still have mine.) We listened to and read poets and prose writers who wrote about landscapes. We drew, took photos, and wrote. Some of us wrote poetry and some of us wrote essays. On travel weekends in the field, we worked silently between 9 and 3. We also camped and got the vans stuck in the sand. We saw cranes - actually, we did not see them, they did not come, but we waited for them, in complete silence, for hours. There was a seriousness to the whole undertaking, an attentiveness, that was beyond structured formal education.

Upon completion of the course, I received, among other credits, two credit hours in "seeing." I am immensely proud of these credits. I learned how to see something: the variety of landscapes, the geography, the danger and pleasure in nature, the relevance of experiencing and valuing an environment, the relationship between experienced nature and written, or examined, filtered and processed, nature. I learned how difficult it is to approximate experience in writing, and I learned how to keep trying. There was, of course, group work: Janet Graham was my camping partner. We all formally presented our work at the end of the course.

My two years at Evergreen, spent on Chaucer, writing, Russian literature and culture and history (I failed the language part), on myths, on Alaskan studies (you had to be there), and on more reading and writing, prepared me perhaps better for graduate studies than a traditional course list might have. (For one thing, I would not have lasted.) I learned how to think, how to observe and analyze, how to evaluate what I saw, and how to choose and ask questions. I learned how to go after answers.

Learning is about connections, it is about relevance, and it is about seeing and experience. At Evergreen, I had the luxury of combining these pieces and earn a college degree in the process. At Coker, we can have a little bit of that, too, by offering an option to intentionally make those connections, give students the chance to engage and take charge of their education a little more. Who knows what that individual voyage will be about.

(If you look closely, you can see it's the same backpack. Someone designed it incredibly well - perhaps someone who knew about chemistry and materials and about outdoor adventure. Some interdisciplinarian, perhaps, who knew how to apply science to life.)