Strategic Working Group #3

Working together, we co-constructed a revised set of guiding questions:

• How do we invest in our departments and disciplinary areas of expertise, while also encouraging interdisciplinary connection and inquiry across campus?
• How are interdisciplinary programs developed and staffed? What would make these programs more sustainable?
• Are there ways that Bryn Mawr College’s relatively small size helps us to foster interdisciplinary inquiry?

Phase 1: Co-construction of working premise/seeding questions, definitions, and work plan:

• What types of data or input do we need?  Where is the relevant existing information?

Phase 2: Data gathering (quantitative and qualitative) and community engagement:

• Pre-existing data (Provost’s office, IR)
• Data that would be useful but is not yet developed or accessible.
• Community Conversations (Town Hall, Faculty Chairs, Undergraduate Deans, IR)Student Perspectives (Focus Groups)
• Faculty and Staff (Survey)

Phase 3: Gap Assessment

• From our current understanding, can we provide insight into our capacity to offer what we currently provide?
• As new majors, minors, departments, or programs emerge, do we have sufficient resources, in the correct roles, to achieve our goals?

Phase 4: Ideas emerging from our data gathering and synthesis/Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

Strengths

• Strong disciplinary programs exist across the College.
• Common belief in value of the liberal arts and commitment to both academic rigor and student success
• Small faculty size may facilitate connection and interdisciplinary work.
• Recent growth of interdisciplinary programs offers insight into needed resources and challenges.
• Interdisciplinary programs contribute to intellectual vibrancy of college and to student engagement.
• Experience with interdisciplinary programs emerging in response to student interest. How can we articulate what we have learned from this experience?  What do enrollment data suggest?  What other indices/benchmarks are important for us to consider?
• Experience with being nimble and responding to changing student interests; fostering innovation.

Weaknesses (internal)

• Resource gap identified; growth of interdisciplinary program has occurred outside of sufficient analysis of sustainability.
• More nuance is needed to understand staffing/faculty impact of expansion of curricular programs.  Work with institutional research to clarify types of data that would be helpful to longer-term planning.
• Student understanding of pathways is limited.
• Social capital needed to navigate academic pathways is not evenly distributed and thereby causes second-order negative impact to equity and inclusion.
• Advising structure doesn’t focus specifically on interdisciplinarity or academic pathways.
• Mission driven: what does student want to learn and why?

Opportunities

• Strengthen the core disciplines through hiring processes and review of faculty deployment practices and policies which, in turn, may foster capacity building for interdisciplinary approaches.
• Explore alternative student-centered approaches to learning that may/may not align with current departmental structures but could be feasibility built on top of said structure rather than in parallel.  Consider other examples that challenge the traditional meaning of academic rigor and excellence to focus on the “why” of student learning.
• Review current departmental and program mission statements; noticing where/how they identify interdisciplinarity as relevant.
• Find additional ways for curriculum committee to work in concert with departments, the provost’s office, and CAP to engage in longer term planning with regard to “downstream” consequences of programmatic expansion.
• Strengthen the core disciplines through hiring processes and review of faculty deployment practices and policies which, in turn, may foster capacity building for interdisciplinary approaches.
• Explore alternative student-centered approaches to learning that may/may not align with current departmental structures but could be feasibility built on top of said structure rather than in parallel.  Consider other examples that challenge the traditional meaning of academic rigor and excellence to focus on the “why” of student learning.
• Review current departmental and program mission statements; noticing where/how they identify interdisciplinarity as relevant.
• Find additional ways for curriculum committee to work in concert with departments, the provost’s office, and CAP to engage in longer term planning with regard to “downstream” consequences of programmatic expansion.
• Leverage the competencies (knowledge, value, skills) associated with current interdisciplinary efforts (e.g., neuroscience, data science, international studies, environmental science) to highlight emerging trends in education. 
• Highlight new methods of inquiry, knowledge synthesis and skill development as applied to student areas of interest.
• Explore impact of interdisciplinarity on student engagement and student success.  Are the interdisciplinary initiatives also offering opportunities for connection and student engagement?  If so, how?
• Consider having each department/program complete a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) in relationship to the balance of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity from both student and faculty perspectives.
• Leverage the unique strength of BMC’s pre-disciplinary opportunities (THRIVE, E-Sem) to begin socializing students to the importance of balancing disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives.
• Strengthen peer-peer mentorship opportunities.

Threats (external)

• We need to understand more about the external landscape at our peer institutions:
• Teaching load for faculty: how do you accomplish interdisciplinary sustainably if we acknowledge current staffing approach is unsustainable
• Student centered approach to applied learning and interdisciplinarity
• Articulation of the connection between the liberal arts and academic/career trajectories
• How can we connect to a student-centered, mission driven approach to education?
• What is the “why” behind a student’s decision to come to a liberal arts college?

Throughout our work, we returned several times to a set of core tensions: 1) Balancing an exploration of the needs and constraints of the current departmental structure (inclusive of majors and minors) with an openness to exploration of what more interdisciplinarity could look like, 2) Balancing our long-standing commitment to academic rigor and excellence, with new ideas about what excellence might look like from an interdisciplinary perspective, 3) Recognizing the current pressures on faculty workload and staffing of academic programs and initiatives, while also considering how we might leverage staff knowledge and skills more effectively, and 4) Honoring the wisdom of faculty and departmental policies and practice, while remaining open to changing student perspectives relating to the “why” of college in general, and of a liberal arts education in particular.

Our early work focused on a discussion of the status quo with an emphasis on staffing pressures faced by departments as faculty endeavor to also contribute to emerging interdisciplinary curricular offerings.  In our early data gathering efforts, we focused on how faculty time, in terms of course equivalencies, is distributed and the pressures that emerging interdisciplinary programs have put on the disciplinary, departmental structure.  A primary concern articulated is that departments are facing challenges in mounting their core requirements with continuing faculty because of faculty commitments to a range of endeavors, including interdisciplinary programs. Our exploration was careful to note that these pressures emanate from various sources: faculty-driven initiatives, administratively driven initiatives, and student-led demand. One emergent theme was therefore a lack of college-wide cohesion, oversight, and long-term planning in resource allocation because of the distributed nature of how and when these initiatives are generated.

As we progressed, we also explored the meaning of academic excellence; beginning to interrogate the traditional definitions of “rigor” and “excellence” as defined by research, methods of knowledge development and analytic skills as occurring primarily within a single discipline.  Recognizing disciplinary strength as critically important, we also heard from group members and constituencies about the emerging importance of new ways of knowing including interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge and methods of inquiry.

Our plan for gathering data to inform our dialogue included: 1) Details from the Provost’s office of available staffing data with particular attention to dynamics of staffing patterns and how faculty FTEs are distributed across multiple endeavors, 2) Perspectives offered by the undergraduate Dean’s office in terms of how students think about the choice of academic major and whether/how to pursue double majors or academic minors, and the processes by which student express interest in new, interdisciplinary approaches and 3) Perspectives of faculty and staff on interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity at the College and 4) Student perspectives on available academic pathways at Bryn Mawr, and the types of resources they utilize in thinking through their approach to academic and career trajectories.

Through dialogue, review of existing data, survey of faculty and staff, and focus groups with students, we developed a general understanding of current pressures on the academic disciplines and a growing resource gap between the number of interdisciplinary programs being developed and the availability of faculty and staff resources required for sustainability or growth. We also noted the increased dependence upon non-tenured faculty to deliver the existing curriculum on offer and interrogated the possible rationale, and the pros and cons of this approach to staffing. Additionally, we noted that the explicit curriculum, the classes that are offered within Bryn Mawr, is only part of the resource set associated with interdisciplinarity.  The co-curricular and implicit learning context are also important to consider.  An example would be the nature of academic advising.  Lastly, the student experiences that occur prior to declaring a major are important to consider in terms of student exposure, through activities such as E-Sems, to core methods and skills that support both the liberal arts and interdisciplinary perspectives. This is also important to consider with regard to fulfilling college-wide requirements through mechanisms such as the op-in nature of the Approaches to Inquiry because faculty who indicate that their courses fulfill one of these requirements may be inviting students more interested in exploration across substantive areas.

Our goal was to develop a sense of current strengths and weaknesses relating to our guiding questions, as well as to identify opportunities within our environment that we might better leverage, as well as external factors, or potential threats, we might suggest for consideration as planning moves forward.

• Increasing reliance on interim faculty
• Data does not reveal how many courses each interim is teaching.  Important to our understanding of whether/how interims are “part of the community” or teaching a small number of courses on a one-time basis.  What is the impact of this on the student experience? On Bryn Mawr’s ability to consistently deliver the core curricular offering in line with College's expectations? On Bryn Mawr’s culture (faculty, administrative, staff, and student sub-cultures)?
• Viewed more positively: Describe the ways that interims are a “resource add” and bring new or different types of experience to the learning environment and may be a benefit to the student experience. A benefit to or necessity of our current operating model and the affordability of our faculty hiring model (i.e., it is allowing us to offer more or better than we could otherwise)?   
• Emergent Questions:
  • Gain more understanding about how/why interims are hired.
  • Do interims tend to be hired as leave replacement or in response to new resources that may come from a gift to the College or to complete core departmental offerings that would otherwise go untaught due to Continuing faculty unavailability?
  • What thought is given to providing cluster opportunities to interims to create more likelihood of integration into the College environment?
  • What is the process of deciding when it may make sense to provide for a CNTT rather than an ongoing utilization of interims in specific instances?
• Further explore the “why” behind a growing reliance on interim hires? Ideas for exploration include:
  • A process issue:  What additional framing could be undertaken in the CAP process to ensure that we are accounting for intended interdisciplinary contributions and cross-program or cross-departmental initiatives that will “take up” faculty time in terms of teaching deployment and research?  This is related to, but different than the general question about how a given candidate might contribute to other initiatives.
  • A financial model issue (i.e., interims are less expensive b/c many are not fully loaded/benefited) that has incentivized one type of labor over another.
  • A student-needs led issue (i.e., is the administration trying to meet needs that are outside traditional faculty positions).
  • A capital allocation discipline issue (i.e., we do not look at this data holistically and in a benchmarked way, as we are attempting to do now, and so capital is not always allocated within a clear or strategic organizing principle and thus is likely to be misallocated in specific instances).

• The Deans are more focused on helping students to identify what they are interested in (addressing the “why” of student education), as opposed to describing or labeling pathways as “disciplinary” or “interdisciplinary.”
• Students need multiple sources of information.  Simply putting pathway information on the website is not enough (some students do not utilize the website).  Students with more developed faculty/advisor relationships tend to have more opportunities for understanding and figuring out various academic pathways (social capital is important to consider especially for students with less educational privilege).
• Students interested in interdisciplinary or combined pathways need support early on, pre-major, so they can plan their academic pathway.
• Students perceive connection with interim faculty as a positive, meeting new people and expanding access to substantive content and applied areas of interest.
• More continuing faculty teaching in structures such as the E-Sem would provide opportunities for student mentorship and for students to get to know more continuing faculty earlier in their Bryn Mawr careers.
• Relationships with professors and advisors are key to student decision making.
• Reaching out to sophomores (pre- major) is especially important.  This is a developmental moment and juncture that can be leveraged.
• What is the focus of advising at this point?
• How can sophomore Deans be helpful in identifying possible pathways based on student interest?
• Visualization of pathways for each major, minor, and program would be helpful (pre-requisites, required courses, connection to other majors/minors/programs).  More visual cues are needed.
• Students who tend not to thrive in current process:
  • Students who don’t meet with advising Dean.
  • Students with less robust relationships with professors
• Impact of different majors requiring different numbers of core courses and being qualitatively different in terms of cross-listing/cross-counting courses from other departments. Some majors are very proscriptive while others are more flexible.  How much do students understand about this?

Examples:

• Connecting STEM to social, political, and economic context
• “The world is not divided into clean buckets..one things informs and influences another”
• “Much like diversity in general, it leads to different ways of problem solving and allows new ideas to flourish.”
• “Interdisciplinarity is the future of work and discovery.”
• “Demonstrating interdisciplinarity to students, either in the form of research or class projects will help them break down barriers and broaden their own way of thinking.” 
• “Needed in grant applications.”

Example:

• “Feeling my knowledge is discounted” and not being “sought out for collaboration.” 

Examples:

• Go beyond “Praxis” to find more “outside the classroom” opportunities for interdisciplinarity.”
• Examples: Global Bryn Mawr, ICC, 360, STEMLA
• Health Interest Programming: “reflect the interprofessional nature of health education today”.

Examples:

• “Allowing departments or disciplines to silo will limit innovation and collaboration.” 
• Being overly siloed ““leaves too much room for gaps, misinformation, untapped potential ideas, communal involvement, and strategic planning” 
• Not communicating across units/departments focused on similar programming. 
• Staffing limitations: need time and support to think more holistically. 
• Defining efficiency as key and over-focusing on quantitative outcomes 

Examples:

• One of the things I love about teaching at Bryn Mawr; Small environment facilitates connections between faculty members for collaborative work across disciplines. 
• Crucial for our students as “they prepare to live in a world where understanding how to bring together data from many sources and process and synthesize it becomes increasingly important.” 
• “An acquaintance with the language of other disciplines is vital for understanding how the information is processed in those disciplines and how the scholarship of one discipline can connect to that of another.” 
• “I hope the College is willing to devote resources toward supporting the expansion of interdisciplinary collaborations, for the good of the faculty as well as the students.” 
• “Exciting work done across disciplines that the college seems to have neither the inclination nor the strategies (flexibility, connection, debate) to explore.” 
• My research has expanded by being involved with interdisciplinary endeavors. 
• Learning from different voices is central to supporting DEIA 
• Vital to academic inquiry 

Examples:

• “The College’s commitment to disciplines and the disciplines’ commitment to themselves has eroded considerably.” 
• Not enough discussion about staffing 
• We lack enough faculty to supervise the wide range of research projects that students propose. 
• “Disciplinary rigor takes on a new meaning in this context and every discipline needs to adapt its pedagogical aims to train our students…with the tools they will need to access and process the available data.” 
• “Our commitment to interdisciplinarity is more about economy than any thoughtful commitment to a mode of inquiry.” 
• Concerns about quality/academic rigor of students’ experiences in interdisciplinary programs 
• “Using the title (of interdisciplinarity) to wallpaper over gaping holes in the curriculum by asking people to lend the fringes of their expertise to programs without a clear intellectual core, history, method or goals.” 
• Interdisciplinary efforts are “starved for resources.” 
• “Most of us... Exemplify interdisciplinarity within our disciplines because we are trying to teach-and exemplify-multiple areas of study and approaches to that work.  But this is very different from our students being able to build connections”.

Examples:

• Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics and the History of Art: institutional structure that supports and guides interdisciplinary collaborations such as research, shared colloquia, learning opportunities for undergraduates as well. 
• Tagging courses for cross-listing 
• Tri-Co Mellon grants to foster connections. 
• Environmental Studies: we have to turn away students, so we need more support. 
• History of Art/Film Studies 
• The Center for Visual Culture
• TLI/Pedagogy across disciplines 
• Structure programs more like Cities: what is built into the curriculum?  Intro course? Capstone? 

Theme: Perception of department as a welcoming or unwelcoming community 

•  “I was set on [a particular career] and knew I’d have to do [major 1] or [major 2] to set up for success. I chose [major 2] because it was a smaller department--closer knit than [major 1].” 
• “I wanted to be a [certain] major and had to take [a required course] at the same time. I picked [the department teaching the required course as my major] because the department is welcoming to students even in general requirement courses.” 
• “I met the current cohort of students and liked them.” 
• “I thought I’d major in [major 1], but I was sort of interested in [major 2]. I chose [major 2] because I didn’t like the [other] department’s response to the student strike.” 

Theme: Discovered passion for subject 

• “I wanted to major in [an interdisciplinary major], and one of the required classes was [in a different department]. I really enjoyed it...the professor taught us about all different kinds of [approaches to the discipline].” Therefore, the student chose to major in the discipline. 
• Another student picked an interdisciplinary major because he liked the subjects it comprises. 

Theme: Feeling toward Discipline 

• On the decision not to double-major: “Other students had passion for a part of [the other major] that I didn’t have. But I had that for [my current major].” 
• “[At first] I double-majored because I didn’t want to decide between majors. I loved them both. The decision to minor was great—I basically completed the major without senior sem. I wish I had decided on a minor earlier.” 

Theme: Diverse Interests / Seeking Balance 

• “I took [a course in my minor] because of college-wide requirements. I found it a good balance with all the STEM classes I was taking. I loved how interactive it was.” 
• “I’ve always been a creative person and wanted that balance in my education. I’m interested in filmmaking, so it’s nice to have those classes in my schedule.” 
• “I wanted to take classes outside of the department.” 

Theme: Marketability 

• “I felt like it’s a little more versatile as a major on applications.” 
• “A [certain] minor is marketable on my resume even though I don’t remember anything about [the subject.]” 
• “A lot of other students are minoring in something.” 

Other Responses

• “I couldn’t get into other classes I needed to fulfill college-wide requirements, so I took [a class in what became my minor], and then kept taking classes.” 
• Why the student chose a certain combination of major and minor: “The overlap between major and minor requirements was appealing.” 

Theme: Ways of Navigating 

• Department website 
• “My major posts a 3-year and 4-year plan on the website, which I appreciated. It was basically ‘plug and chug.’ I knew what I had to take each semester.” 
• Major advisor 
• Conversation with peers: “The major lounge is a useful networking space; TAs provide connections to peers with advice.” 

Theme: What Helps 

• “What’s nice about [my major] is it’s such a broad major that so many random classes just count. I was abroad last spring, and my major advisor told me, ‘Whatever you take in the study-abroad program will count.’ It was nice that I had the freedom to choose.” 
• “I like the flexibility of the major. I can go to the head of the department and say that a course counts and explain why.” 
• “My department sells itself on having an accessible major with three required classes and three 300-levels.” 
• Intro classes for the major are mostly taken by first years. First years get sucked into the department. 

Theme: What Hinders; Choosing a major later 

• “Planning ahead is essential. At first, I wanted to try a bunch of different classes—it wasn’t the best choice. I got to know what I was interested in but knowing [early on] gives you greater flexibility later. I decided [on my major] late and had to catch up.” 
• “It’s a good model—I’m glad students don’t have to declare before get here, but time to explore doesn’t always pan out—you have to catch up quickly in STEM or social sciences.” 
• “If you decide late, it makes it complicated.” 
• “My major has a prescribed set of requirements and an order you have to take them. I had a little trouble fulfilling one of the requirements because my first year I didn’t know I wanted to [pursue this major] and I had to take courses up to a certain level.” 

Theme: Number of Courses Offered 

• A student describes general frustration of either not enough or too many upper-level courses each semester. 
• A different student describes being frustrated when the major advisor sends out the list of courses for the next semester. “I wonder, ‘Could I make this class [that’s not on the list] count if I wanted to?’ But I don’t want to go through the trouble.” 
• “In my major, the requirements are prescribed, and you can only bend them if you can get a professor on your side and make a compelling enough case. Major requirements have recently changed, so this comment might not apply to other students.” 
• Graduate students take two courses per year. The students took courses not relevant to their area of specialization because that was what was being offered and eventually switched focus and advisor. 

Theme: Major advisor and senior professors in the department 

• The major advisor is “very helpful guiding students.” Choosing classes and navigating major, figuring out how to get into research, navigating difficult conversations with faculty in the department. 

Theme: Fellow students or TAs 

• “A person who knows all the classes and the department. It’s important to have a peer perspective from someone who’s taken the class.”  
• TAs “point students toward majors in the department.” 
• TAs hang out in the major lounge and make introductions to other students who can answer questions. 

Theme: Peer Mentors 

• “Before I was a peer mentor, I didn’t go to the peer mentors even though I should have. I’d go straight to my dean or a professor I had at the time because I didn’t know all the resources on campus.” Advantages of a peer mentor: a peer mentor responds to email within a day [unlike deans and profs]; “peer mentors talk to students when they’re afraid to talk to dean about their uncertainty” about their choice of major. 
• Students note that the pandemic made them more reliant on dean/faculty advice – now that they know where to find student mentors, they seek those out more. 

Theme: Experiences

• “Just being a Cities major answers that question.” 
• “Visual studies is interdisciplinary—philosophy, art history.” 
• “I think of interdisciplinarity as skill sets. A big part of doing a minor in a non-STEM field is [working on] writing ability, being concise, analytical skills—putting two things together, reading comprehension. I can get through 100-200 pages quickly and take what I need from it.” 
• “Graduating this year, I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything. It’s interesting seeing how my major and minor overlap at times. E.g., pursuing film, watching documentaries about economic issues, you can see how you can use
• both sets of knowledge. Thinking about society—how effective are policies, how well are documentaries getting their message across.” 
• “My major and minor combination are a clear example of that. [I was] driven by college-wide requirements rather than my own drive. I feel very well rounded as a senior.” [Student defines interdisciplinarity as exposure to different disciplines.] 

Theme: Obstacles to Interdisciplinarity 

• "Because the major is so structured, it’s hard to make room for interdisciplinarity without double-majoring. If you want a minor, you have to plan very carefully.”  
• “People [who aren’t majors] take classes out of interest, but there’s less enduring community with them after class is over.” 

Theme: Broad skillset 

• “I chose a liberal arts education because I was seeking to improve on skills that [a professional graduate] school wasn’t going to develop, and the value is that in the places I’m going, I feel prepared to do a lot of different things.” 
• “Gaining different skills from my major and minor. I was [recently] talking with my family about how if I went to school just for science, I wouldn’t have the same perspectives I have today about my areas of interest. I see things more broadly.” 

Theme: Exploration 

• “I was able to take classes outside my major—e.g., [foreign language] profs really care about students.” 
• “Because it took me 1.5 years to decide on a major, a liberal arts college gave me time to explore.” 
• It “gives you the OK to try things—especially with the course distribution. I took an anthropology class thinking, “oh maybe I’ll be an anthro major” and got to hold skulls and be in a lab course.” 

Theme: Making Connections Between Ideas 

• A liberal arts education “primes you to look for connections in things.” 
• “Taking classes in other departments helped me think about what to value in the [STEM] field—grad school or industry. It helped me think about the impact scientists are having on the world and was useful in making a better decision.” 

Theme: Community/Small Size 

• “I came from a small high school and was nervous about going to a massive school. It’s been nice to go to a small school with a strong sense of community. I decided my major during COVID. It was nice to know all of the other majors and be friends with them.” 
• “I chose a small school because I wanted profs to know me and opportunities to do research that I might not have sought out at a bigger school.” 
• "I only applied to liberal arts colleges because I knew I wanted to major in STEM and to do research and I thought a liberal arts school would be smaller and [give me] more contact with faculty.” 
• “Bryn Mawr is the only [STEM] graduate program that says ‘we value teaching’ and graduate students care deeply about their students.” 
• “At the root of a small school is relationships. Student-student, student-professor, and student-staff, and those relationships continue beyond graduation.” 
• “I’m looking for a job now and making connections with alums. The alums I’ve talked with had positive experiences. It’s nice to hear from people who appreciated their major and school and offer to help.” 

Theme: Sense of Community 

• “Even though it can be challenging academic-wise, you have a tight sense of community. It doesn’t feel competitive like in high school. I felt supported by people around me—the availability of professors and knowing I have resources and people listening to your voice.” 

Theme: Self-Confidence 

• “My major developed my self-confidence.” [Lengthy response about how professors believed in student and student now believes in herself.
• “Confidence. I knew I didn’t want to do math or science, and [my major] made me think about things differently. I feel confident that I’ll end up somewhere that I’ll like. I go to a good institution, I have a good educational background, I’m confident I’ll end up somewhere good.” 

Other Responses

• “I’m majoring in critical thinking. I’m not going to be a professor reading books and writing down my thoughts about them every day. I know how to read a text and think about what it’s really saying, think about connections between things. I’ve learned you can treat anything as a text that you read and give value to, nothing is unimportant.” 

Responses

• Administrative transparency.
• The administration leaves the student body wondering what’s happening. 
• The open-ended model of exploring for two years and then declaring. Making sure we’re catching students at the end of the first year who aren’t taking classes directed toward a major. Preventing students from getting to sophomore spring without a direction. 
• More spaces for students to speak about what they like and don’t like within departments. 
• Planning and publicizing info sessions, answering questions
• Clarity about what resources are available to Haverford students majoring at Bryn Mawr, and vice versa.