Backward Design Across the Curriculum

In his article, "End the University as We Know It," chair of Columbia University's religion department, Mark C. Taylor, calls for a radical redefinition of colleges and universities. He strongly criticises narrow scholarship in which "each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems." Sound familiar? To me, it seems very much like the irrelevance that Wiggins and McTighe criticise of coverage pedagogy in the classroom, but on the larger stage of the institution with the larger stakes of college-wide curriculum.

Taylor uses the example of international relations theory ignoring the role of religion in society to imply that current disciplinary divisions are inadequate. Instead, Taylor proposes to "abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs" such as "Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life, and Water [or what he goes on to explain as what I would label as Environment]." Again, what this looks like to me is Wiggins/McTighe's consideration of the Results stage before Assessment and actual Design.

For example, the "Mind department" would consider new cognitive reading and writing strategies, and so would employ a medical psychologist and literacy specialist in collaboration. Or, similarly, in the "Money department," a business scholar and a Marxist literary critic for some other project. The limits are endless, and make for more dynamic scholarship that, because of its holistic approach, is bound to be more relevant to society.

These examples do reflect the current increasing trend of scholarship that uses inter- and trans-disciplinary methodologies, so perhaps we are already headed in that direction...