Students and Faculty from Multiple Disciplines

Bring students from dissimilar fields together to work with at least 2 mentors (faculty, students, external experts, or other partners) also from diverse areas of expertise. Often there is an external client or partner or outside expert, or even another seminar at a different university with whom we partner. The class explores a rich topic with an orientation towards creating new solutions, knowledge, or products, or experimenting with new approaches or tools to look at problems and subjects in novel ways.

Collaborative Methods

Utilize methods such as innovation studios, field experiences, collaborative technologies (i.e., video conferencing, social media) and labs to harbor an environment of experiential collaboration between students. Students gain the capacity to effectively collaborate, self-organize, and create meaningful and sustainable connections between individuals, disciplines, institutions and communities.

Transformative Solution-Oriented Outcomes

Some courses will leverage corporate and community partnerships to create innovative products, solutions, and new ideas that provide value. Others will innovate through discovering new knowledge or approaches toward understanding more deeply a hard "wicked" problem, frozen conflict, or unsolved pervasive issue (like poverty or global warming) through a multi-disciplinary inquiry experience. In such cases the transformative effect is within -- faculty and students and community partners all are changed by this new way of seeing the interconnected complexity in the world.