Most courses in colleges and universities are taught by only one instructor. This is often necessitated by the financial exigencies of educational institutions, but is also due to an academic tradition in which the ideal is a single expert teaching in a single discipline. The rapidly changing realities of both the higher education and job markets, however, have called the traditional ideal into question. Interdisciplinary collaborative teaching is one way to adapt to the needs of twenty-first-century students, by modeling lifelong learning for students and inviting instructors to be more deliberately reflective about disciplinary assumptions, learning styles, and pedagogies."Collaborative teaching" is a broad term that can include any and all configurations, whether long-or short-term, of two or more teachers working together with the same group of students. Although specific methods of collaboration vary significantly -everything from year-long learning communities to team-taught semester courses to one-day classroom exchanges 1 -the simple act of collaborating across disciplines, particularly as a means of modeling lifelong learning, is the focus of this essay.Most of us teach alone. The vision of an individual professor lecturing in front of a classroom full of attentive students is so iconic that it is hardly ever questioned. Such a vision is not only a product of our own experiences as students, but is reinforced by popular media images of bearded, tweed-clad white men that bombard our collective subconscious. According to one study, "traditional teaching" -in which an individual teacher determines the subject matter, organizes the syllabus, determines the means of evaluation, and lectures to students in rows -has been so widespread as to be an almost exclusive model in American colleges and universities (Davis 1995, 33-34). 2 Our experiences as teachers, however, may cause us to question the wisdom of the received image. Upon finding ourselves responsible for a classroom full of impressionable young minds, or perhaps finding ourselves responsible for teaching subjects in which we have not been trained (World Religions, anyone?), we may suddenly come to the harsh realization that the model of the expert professor is more fantasy than reality.
This paper describes an interdisciplinary undergraduate course exploring multiple intersections of economics and religion using a variety of textual sources, exercises, and teaching methods from both fields. We conclude that such a course can be valuable for both majors and non-majors. Economics majors may gain a greater awareness of the philosophical underpinnings and ethical implications of their social science, while non-economists may gain an appreciation for the many ways in which the economic way of thinking affects and can be applied to aspects of their everyday lives. While this course was taught in a largely secular school with Presbyterian roots, the syllabus can easily be adjusted for a more evangelical college.
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