Mentoring Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Courses

In this chapter, I discuss the special needs and opportunities for effective faculty and graduate-student mentoring of undergraduates in an interdisciplinary model. These undergraduates are enrolled in large science-based, interdisciplinary, introductory (SBII) courses. I derived the commentary from five years of experience as the course director for the two-semester sequence—Introduction to Global Change, Part I: Physical Impacts and Part II: Human Impacts—at the University of Michigan. Although this model is specific with regard to topic and campus location, any interdisciplinary faculty team can apply the lessons learned and possible implementation strategies. New experiments with introductory science curricula, such as the University of Michigan’s Global Change courses, are being conducted for two principal reasons. First, these courses are influential in determining students’ career and academic choices, often providing the final opportunity for certain students to gain a basic appreciation for science and the scientific method as part of their general education. Second, past assessments in many disciplines have shown that students can sometimes be permanently alienated from science by traditional courses that emphasize rote learning. In response to these concerns, extensive efforts were made during the past decade to reform introductory curricula in mathematics (Artique, 1999), chemistry (Lloyd, 1994), physics (Physics Education Research, 1999), biology (Coalition for Education in the Life Sciences, 1999), and other disciplines, as well as to develop new interdisciplinary courses, designed to be broadly accessible to and appealing for first-year students. The mentoring in these classes is a key source of motivation for students to continue to study science.