Building Teaching Collaborations across Disciplines

Current engineering curricula provide few opportunities for students to interact with their peers in other disciplines. However, the engineering profession, and society as a whole, is becoming more and more integrated requiring communication skills for discussing a variety of topics with a variety of audiences. Engineering students need opportunities to practice communicating technical information with non-technical audiences. One way for engineering instructors to facilitate these opportunities is to collaborate with faculty in non-technical disciplines. Developing and sustaining cross-disciplinary learning experiences requires collaborating instructors to model strong communication and team-working skills for their students. The objective of this paper is to discuss best practices for incorporating cross-disciplinary experiences for students into engineering coursework. This paper describes the implementation of a cross-disciplinary experience between engineering and elementary education students. Lessons learned by the course instructors and the subsequent adjustments to the project implementation are discussed in the hopes that future instructors of cross-disciplinary experiences will benefit.