Music and Worship Faculty Publications

Perspectives from the Outside: The Value of Cross-disciplinary Team Teaching

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-20-2018

Journal Title

College Music Symposium

ISSN

2334-203X

Volume

58

Issue

2

DOI

https://doi.org/10.18177/sym.2018.58.sr.11386

Abstract

Having team-taught a course in Music and History with an esteemed colleague across campus for over six years, I thought it high time to pause and reflect on the value-added factor of such an endeavor. Additionally, I was curious to find out what current pedagogical research had to say about cross-disciplinary instruction and team-teaching. Although I admit I should have researched the scholarship on such pedagogies before launching into our experimental course, I confess to being one of those “fools [who] rush in where angels fear to tread.”

It all happened rather serendipitously. One day at an all-university faculty meeting, I leaned over to one of my History colleagues, and said, “I’m interested in teaching a course that merges music and nationalism. Would any of you be interested?” He smiled and said, “That would be me.” Long story short, we turned out to be a great team and have run our course three times now.

My goal in this short essay is to make a case for cross-disciplinary and team-taught courses in Music plus non-music disciplines. I will briefly survey one pertinent study on cross-disciplinary teaching, and two on team-teaching, comparing the results with my own in-the-trench experiences.

Keywords

Team teaching, cross discipline, collaboration, forums

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