By Ana M. Corbacho

How can interdisciplinary courses for undergraduates move from being intuitively designed to theoretically based? How can course design accommodate cohorts of teachers, not previously experienced in interdisciplinarity, from across a university?
Here I share how colleagues and I developed courses where teams of university faculty worked with undergraduate students to tackle interdisciplinary problems.
I first describe three useful theoretical perspectives for building an interdisciplinary undergraduate course, namely:
- social constructivism and situated-learning theory
- academic motivation
- interdisciplinary education from a diversity perspective.