Team-Teaching as a Promising Pathway toward Interdisciplinary Sustainability Competency Development

Abstract

Through a qualitative, interview-based inquiry on students’ learning in a single team-taught course focused on energy resources and policy implications, our team explored how team-taught interdisciplinary courses facilitate students’ development as leaders in energy resource sustainability. We conducted pre- and post-course interviews of nine undergraduate student participants and the two co-instructors for the course. The students self-identified as seven women and two men, ranging in age from 18 to 21 years. Six students were White, two were Asian/Asian American, and one was Black; the co-instructors were White men. To develop our findings, all interviews were subjected to a process of qualitative coding to derive themes, which we present with rich data from participants’ verbatim quotes. Findings revealed that constructivist-informed interdisciplinary instruction by the teaching team deepened students’ understandings of the importance of the knowledge of both energy science and policy, helping them to become holistically informed on critical issues in energy resource sustainability. Further, students recognized that an integrated understanding of these bodies of knowledge was critical to writing energy resource policy memos that constituted the central learning/assessment activity of the course. The kind of literacy afforded to the students through the team-teaching endeavor is foundational to students’ development as climate leaders. We suggest that this mode of teaching may represent an effective teaching enhancement for preparing energy sustainability and climate change leaders at the University of Michigan, other US institutions and internationally.

1. Introduction

The ever-increasing sustainability concerns that permeate the national and global landscape and affect all domains of life indicate that it is critically important for higher education institutions to help cultivate climate and sustainability leadership skills in their students, in part by developing and embedding interdisciplinary courses into the curriculum [1]. Interdisciplinary teaching of environmental and sustainability subject matter is essential for students to acquire multiple lenses through which to frame, explore and make evidence-based objective decisions on complex issues such as climate change [1]. Moreover, as illuminated by Ashley Bear, senior program officer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, graduates who lack interdisciplinary knowledge and skills are at a disadvantage in a job market that has increasingly been demanding employees capable of dexterously applying critical thinking to real-world problems [2]. For students to meaningfully acquire, develop, and apply sustainability and climate literacy (including analytical and problem-solving skills) whether in personal, professional, or civic spheres, opportunities to experience truly integrated interdisciplinary content are critical, albeit limited. The building of such literacy is foundational to students’ emergence as climate and sustainability leaders [1]. The development of such skills requires an integrated approach to teaching across disciplines that inform sustainability, environmental, and climate change content in individual classes as well as across entire programs [3]. The complexity of climate change and sustainability challenges requires personal, professional, and civic leadership marked by deep engagement with multiple disciplinary lenses in cross-cutting ways that match the intricate nature of the issues [1,3]. Based on the literature reviewed and the results of the present inquiry, team-teaching that combines faculty engagement in co-planning and executing curriculum, including constructivist course activities, with intentional pedagogical work that integrates multiple relevant disciplines, holds promise to effect this critical integration in individual classes. This pedagogical approach is worthy of deep consideration as a core pedagogical approach to be deployed systematically throughout students’ environment and sustainability programs rather than being implemented as a one-off elective experience.

In the present study, we focused on one University of Michigan course, EARTH/ENVIRON 344: Sustainable and Fossil Energy: Options and Consequences, which is taught by two of the co-authors (Adam Simon and Mike Shriberg), one of whom is an energy science specialist (Simon) and the other who is a policy specialist (Shriberg). In this course, the instructors aimed to facilitate students’ development of energy resource/societal impacts/policy literacy that is foundational to their ability to become effective leaders in energy sustainability and climate change. Within this context, we explored the research question: How does a team-taught interdisciplinary course facilitate students’ development as leaders in energy resource sustainability and climate change? Through pursuing this question, we hoped to identify specific elements of team-teaching that helped students develop energy resource/societal impacts/policy literacy as they engaged with EARTH/ENVIRON 344.

2. Literature Review

2.1. The Need for Interdisciplinary Teaching in Sustainability Domains

Problem-solving in professional environments has increasingly come to require the engagement of individuals who can contribute expertise to interdisciplinary teamwork [4]. Interdisciplinary teamwork requires that individuals take integrated conceptual and problem-solving approaches that draw upon multiple disciplinary lenses. In this way, they are able to engage in a deeper analysis and treatment of complex issues [4], among which are those of environmental sustainability and climate change. Given that sustainability scholarship and practice are inherently interdisciplinary, education in this domain requires effectively spanning disciplinary boundaries [5]. Moreover, as the interaction between humans and the environment has become increasingly complex, students and faculty in environmental sustainability studies must increasingly engage in interdisciplinary teaching and learning activities, including field experiences, as human–environment interactions are not unidimensional but take place in sociopolitical contexts characterized by racial and class inequities [6]. Interdisciplinarity involves not only the knowledge and application of multiple disciplinary lenses, but also engaging with these disciplines in ways that intentionally and consistently make interconnections among them on conceptual, practical, and contextual levels [7].

A foundational element of climate change leadership is the building of energy literacy—“a construct that combines conceptual fluency with the economic and social components of energy use, along with the belief that an increase in energy literacy will result in more sustainable energy practices” [8] (pp. 132–133). Moreover, drawing upon the report of the United States Global Change Research Program, Lee and colleagues note that energy literacy “requires a comprehensive consideration of civics, history, economics, sociology, psychology, and politics along with science, math, and engineering” [9] (p. 99). Energy literacy involves not only gaining knowledge about energy sources in a sociopolitical context, but also beginning to develop attitudes and behaviors that facilitate climate change leadership in the personal sphere [9]. Such literacy is foundational to change leadership on civic and professional levels. Drawing upon MacDonald and Shriberg’s [10] review of the sustainability leadership literature, climate leadership can be understood as encapsulating a blending of critical, strategic, and systemic thinking with the skills of collaboration, communication, perspective-taking, and emotional intelligence. Moreover, the ability to anticipate and creatively respond to challenges is key.

2.2. Advancing Interdisciplinary Learning through Team-Teaching

Many sustainability academic programs have attempted to address the goal of students’ acquiring interdisciplinary knowledge and skills by requiring them to take a range of distinct courses in different disciplines [11]. However, teaching in disciplinary silos does not constitute optimal preparation for related fields that “inherently rely on the integration of knowledge and action across multiple disciplines to solve complex, real-world problems” [3] (p. 730). There is indeed a large contrast between education that is intentionally integrative of multiple disciplines (from planning to execution) and education that occurs through a collection of courses from multiple disciplines or the splitting of courses along lines that rigidly reflect two or more distinct disciplines. As such, team-teaching has increasingly been viewed as the optimal means through which students can acquire interdisciplinary knowledge and skills [12,13].

2.3. The Nature of Team-Teaching and Its Promise in Sustainability Education

Given the many variations represented in the details of team-teaching partnerships, a broad working definition is practical [14], such as that offered by Davis [15]. This educational theorist framed team-teaching as “all arrangements that include two or more faculty in some level of collaboration in the planning and delivery of a course” (p. 8). Some scholars have indicated as few as three or four variations of team-teaching [16,17] while others have described as many as seven [18], with most representing a continuum from least to more collaborative, complex, and integrative. However, teaching teams may function in ways that transcend single, neat categories. For example, full integration might take place in planning, course design, and assessment, but it may not always be the case that all members of the teaching partnership are present when a specific partner is the topic lead. Moreover, it has been argued that preoccupation with the logistical arrangements of team-teaching may preclude a more essential focus—the pedagogical approaches that are employed by the teaching team [19]. Indeed, much of the team-teaching literature indicates, whether explicitly or implicitly, that constructivist approaches are essential to the impact of team-teaching on student learning. Citing Brooks and Brooks [20], Yuen and Hau [21] offered that constructivist pedagogy could be seen as teaching that is guided by the following principles: (a) posing problems of emerging relevance to students; (b) structuring concepts from whole to part; (c) valuing students’ points of view and addressing students’ suppositions; and (d) assessing student learning in context. Essentially, students’ experiences are central to their learning process and to varying degrees, faculty treat them as agentic partners—capable of constructing their own learning. Lord [22], who compared lecture and constructivist teaching approaches in terms of their impact on student learning in environmental science, found significant gaps between a treatment group that experienced constructivist teaching (e.g., problem-solving authentic cases and creating concept maps) and a comparison group that attended traditional lectures (employing slides and transparencies while affording no interaction between students). The treatment group experienced deeper engagement, mastery, and enjoyment of the material compared to the latter. When two or more teachers facilitate courses that bring multiple disciplines together using constructivist approaches, and students are intentionally facilitated in learning about and applying multiple perspectives, students’ engagement with multiple disciplinary perspectives heightens their awareness of problem complexity and requires them to construct more complex meanings—both conceptual and practical [23,24].

2.4. Literature on Team-Teaching in Sustainability Courses

In the reviewed literature, most partnerships consisted of at least one natural scientist (e.g., in the fields of geology or ecology) and one social scientist (e.g., in the fields of sociology or political science) who came together to provide an interdisciplinary learning experience, often for students who represented a wide array of disciplinary homes [3,25] and class levels from first-year students to seniors [3,25]. Across the studies, active learning pedagogies consistent with constructivism were employed. These included individual and collective reflective activities and debriefing [24,25], case studies [26], field experiences [24] or place-based learning [23,25], cooperative discussion [25], debate [13], group projects [12,23], role-playing [25], peer feedback on written assignments [3], informal peer-mentoring in contexts where multiple class levels of students constituted the course membership [3], and creating personal sustainability portfolios and pathways [3].

Students in the reviewed studies experienced several benefits that characterized the quality of the learning experience. These included more frequent and detailed feedback [13]; a sense of community and access to multiple perspectives [3]; engagement in authentic case- and place-based learning [25]; and collaborative problem-solving [25]. Students’ knowledge gains included an expanded understanding of the relationship between sustainability and business profitability [26]; an advanced understanding of the relationship between intersectional social, political, and economic issues and sustainability [23]; a heightened sense of relevance of interdisciplinary perspectives [3]; an enhanced perspective on their home disciplines [12]; the ability to create personal sustainability plans [3,24]; and the capacity to dissect and articulate solutions to complex problems orally and in writing [23].

Notwithstanding the plethora of benefits noted in the sustainability team-teaching literature, authors have reported challenges experienced by students. These include heavy reading requirements (a complaint tendered by a minority of students) [12], and demanding writing loads for project work [23]. Notably, some students who reported the latter eventually conceded that the projects were fundamental to their learning and constituted an invaluable component of their overall university experience [23]. Another account indicated that some students experienced challenges keeping up with dynamic changes taking place in the course, which were connected to instructors’ adjustment of planned content to avoid redundancy with what other team members had already covered [3]. Further, some findings have revealed that some students (typically more junior ones) may struggle with multiple perspectives that seem incompatible [25].

2.5. Team-Teaching in the Virtual Space

Regarding team-teaching in the virtual space, there exists a small body of literature focused primarily on blended learning. Across this literature, the teaching affordances and benefits to student learning seemed to hinge primarily on the extent to which online pedagogical tools helped to advance constructivist teaching and learning approaches. Some of these tools included interactive discussion boards [27]; breakout room facilities for collaborative work [28]; and real-time structures for students to contribute to content, for example, by sharing hyperlinks in synchronous chats [27]. The benefits of online team-teaching included fostering peer relationships and resource-sharing [29], engagement of students who would typically be reticent to actively participate in traditional classrooms [29], increased interaction with course material [30], and flexibility of roles between students and teachers, with students taking leading roles reflecting their growing expertise [27], increased learning resources [31], and greater instructor presence [31]. Moreover, for field-based science courses, given the increasing availability of open-source observational data and virtual labs for science courses, a promising picture was revealed for the online facilitation of interdisciplinary courses, such as ecology [28].

2.6. Summary of Previous Findings and Location of the Research Gap

The studies we reviewed for the present inquiry revealed that through the skillful planning and facilitation by interdisciplinary teaching teams, students deepened their understanding of the complexity of sustainability-related issues and the need for reliance on integrated disciplinary perspectives to productively frame and articulate possible solutions to such problems. Further, students seemed to enjoy and feel further motivated to engage with multiple perspectives on these issues. Collectively, these studies demonstrate that interdisciplinary team-teaching is related to several positive learning outcomes, notwithstanding varying degrees of logistical challenge. Further, when we consider studies on virtual team-teaching, structures and tools that support constructivist approaches have shown promise to enhance the collaborative learning experiences that allow students to engage with multiple perspectives in addition to those provided by the instructional team. Notwithstanding the value of the existing literature to provide insight into the impact of team-teaching on facilitating students’ learning of sustainability-related content, attitudes, and skills, shortcomings exist. Much of the literature is reflective and descriptive and does not include researcher perspectives outside of the instructors who co-developed and team-taught the courses. Hence, there was a compelling need for enhanced empirical research approaches that probe deeply into students’ qualitative experiences in team-taught sustainability courses, employing education researchers who are not a part of the teaching team. The present study aimed to address these shortcomings through in-depth qualitative pre- and post-course interviews yielding rich data from a sampling of students and the teaching team. Our research team, while it included the instructors in parts of the writing process and of course as interviewees, a higher education doctoral student and higher education postdoctoral student were wholly responsible for the data collection and analysis.

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. Context

In the present study, we examined team-teaching in the context of EARTH/ENVIRON 344: Sustainable and Fossil Energy: Options and Consequences. The course focused on hands-on critical analysis of energy resources, including coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro-electric, and energy efficiency, conservation, and storage in relation to energy policy. Students learned about historic, current, and forecasted energy resource use by society; the economics, politics, and policies at the local, state, national, and international levels that affect energy resource availability; the science and engineering of fossil fuel and renewable energy resources; and the natural and anthropogenic climate forcing as they relate to energy resource use. The course explored each energy resource individually and comparatively and utilized a policy analysis framework to integrate the various perspectives.

The course has normally been situated in the field based at the University of Michigan’s (U-M’s) Camp Davis Rocky Mountain Field Station in Hoback Junction, Wyoming and other sites throughout Wyoming and Idaho. This has facilitated visits to mines, communities, and plants that process the wide range of energy resources covered in the course. Students have interacted with professionals and leaders at these sites and learned first-hand about each resource. EARTH/ENVIRON 344 is currently team-taught by Adam Simon, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and Mike Shriberg, Professor of Practice & Engagement in the School for Environment & Sustainability, hereafter referred to as “energy science instructor” and “policy instructor”, respectively. As of summer 2020, the course had been taught a total of nine times.

During the summer 2020 semester, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the class was shifted to a fully remote setting. Each instructor taught their own sessions synchronously (with recordings available for students who could not attend in real time) around the theme for each week, which was one of the energy resources (fossil and renewable) and a level of policy analysis (e.g., local or international). Students received the energy science (with some policy implications) from the energy science instructor, and this was followed by a class session in which the policy instructor deeply explored the policy issues. To assure alignment between the contents of their respective class sessions, the instructors not only met weekly for formal team meetings, but also viewed recordings of each other’s sessions and engaged in email communications and text messaging as necessary to ensure content alignment. Further, they made explicit references to each other’s expertise so that students could anticipate how the other faculty member’s expertise would fill out the overall picture, and experience the value of collaborating across disciplines and/or professions. The instructors ran the virtual course using an adapted version of the flipped classroom model deployed in the field version of the course. They assigned students pre-recorded lectures, videos, and/or reading material prior to class. Further, they assessed students’ depth of understanding using essay-style quizzes administered prior to each class. The instructors also had students submit their own questions, stimulated by engaging with the pre-class material. This allowed the instructors, including guest lecturers, to focus class time on specific components of each energy topic and to engage in conversation with the students. The assignments in the course were integrative and included case study analyses, exams with integrative questions, and several written policy memos.

The multiple policy memos students were assigned to write were the site in which the energy sustainability and climate leadership components were most strongly located. Students assumed the role of an intern for the Trump or Biden Presidential transition team. The instructors provided instructions on how policy memos should be scaffolded and written for their intended audience but allowed the students many degrees of freedom to steer their policy memos in the directions they chose based on their critical analyses of the energy and policy knowledge and communication strategies they had learned and practiced throughout the course. Moreover, students were constructively engaged in the course through role-playing, group discussions, and peer review of their policy memos—activities that helped to sharpen their analytical skills and broaden their perspectives. The partially flipped classroom model afforded them the opportunity to engage in self-directed learning and contribute to the shaping of course content by submitting questions that were intended to help inform the content the instructors would pursue each class session. Overall, the instructors engaged the students in exercises that allowed them to express their intuitive theories around various subjects (e.g., what “killed” the coal industry in the United States?), then provide detailed information to the students in a way that allowed them to analyze their intuitive theories and compare and/or debate them with the instructors and/or professionals in the energy field who served as guest speakers and real-world connectors.

3.2. Data Collection

Prior to the start of the summer 2020 semester, we invited all enrolled students (n = 35) in EARTH/ENVIRON 344 to participate in the study. Interested students participated in a pre-interview prior to the start of the course (n = 10) and then a post-interview (n = 9) after the class ended. Each in-depth interview took place over Zoom and was about an hour in length. Interview topics included the experience of learning in a team-taught course on energy resources and policy and climate and energy leadership development. Additionally, both faculty participated in interviews before and in the early stages of the course and at its conclusion. These interviews lasted approximately two hours each and explored topics around the experience of planning, organizing, and executing team-teaching and scaffolding and implementing a connected energy science and policy curriculum to facilitate students’ achievement of knowledge, skills, and attitudes connected to and supportive of climate and sustainability leadership. The use of in-depth interviews allowed us to surface rich data of both the student and faculty experience of the course.

3.3. Sample

The majority of students in EARTH/ENVIRON 344 typically come from outside the natural sciences. This course has no prerequisites and is intended for undergraduate students at all levels. In the instructors’ experience, almost all students who have completed the course initially possessed very little prior knowledge of these topics. Further, the grade distribution has shown that students from across academic disciplines tend to perform equally well. Having students from across the academic landscape facilitates engagement in mutual learning through sharing unique lived experiences as well as career and life goals. This has helped to enhance the value of constructivist approaches used in the class (e.g., peer feedback/exchange of perspectives and role-play).

Table 1. Participants’ Major Interests.

Pseudonym	Major/Intended Major Pre-Course	Major/Intended Major Post-Course
Traci	Biological Sciences/Pre-Med (also spoke a lot about reading and holistic thinking).	Biological Sciences/Pre-Med. Had also considered taking more environmental-related classes (because of interest in the adverse health impacts of poor environmental conditions on specific populations).
Sylvia	Interests in Pre-Med or Pre-Law with a specialty in Environmental Studies.	Was now leaning more strongly towards Political Science and Energy Resources.
Hailey	Interests leaned towards International Studies	Had not changed her major intentions but increased her interest in the environment and sustainability.
Brenda	Psychology (with strong natural science interests)	Was considering the addition of natural sciences minor. Had also been considering taking a few more courses related to EARTH/ENVIRON 344 content (with some indication that these might be more energy-focused).
Kiley	Arts	Planned to switch to a double major in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies.
Angela	Engineering with main interest in Renewable Energy & Clean Energy Resources.	Indicated that she would complete degree as planned.
Andre	Engineering with strong interests in Environmental Justice.	Indicated that he would complete degree as planned.
Harris	Political Science	Indicated that he would complete degree as planned.
Gillian	Humanities	Indicated that she would complete degree as planned.

below introduces our student sample of participants from the summer 2020 iteration of the course, consisting of nine who completed both the pre- and post-interviews. Typical student enrollment is approximately 20 students, but the online-only format in Summer 2020 reduced numbers significantly. Students came from a range of disciplinary backgrounds.

Table 2. Participant Demographic Characteristics.

Demographic Characteristic		N
Gender
	Woman	7
	Man	2
	Other Identification	0
Race/Ethnicity
	White	6
	Black	1
	Asian/Asian American	2
	Hispanic/Latino/a	0
	Native American	0
Age
	18–19	5
	20–21	3
	Over 21	1
Academic Level
	First-year student	4
	Sophomore	1
	Junior	0
	Senior	4

provides demographic data on these participants.

3.4. Data Analysis

Given her experience with qualitative research, Jennifer Pollard, one of the two non-instructor authors, conducted the bulk of the qualitative analysis. She read participants’ de-identified interview transcripts multiple times throughout the coding process. During the initial stages, she conducted open coding within the overarching theme of team-teaching on two pairs of student transcripts (pre- and post-interview) for a first-year student and a senior in order to engage with a broader set of experiences. Open coding is the process of breaking data into meaningful chunks and assigning descriptive labels (codes) that are reflective of the concept they represent [32]. Based on initial coding, she developed a working codebook and applied it to the remaining student transcripts. She added newly emerging codes to the codebook. Moreover, she revisited previously coded transcripts to apply new codes as necessary. Upon reading and coding of a single faculty member’s pre- and post-interview transcripts, Jennifer further extended and revised the codebook. She then also applied these codes to the analysis of the second faculty member’s transcripts. The emerging codes reflected a variety of elements relating to team-teaching. Jennifer read the contents of each code multiple times within and across participants to uncover broader categories reflecting subthemes [32] relating to the overarching theme of team-teaching. The use of an Excel spreadsheet that organized participants’ respective code contents helped to optimize this process. Further, the analysis involved comparisons made between student themes and those of the co-instructors to explore possible connections. Throughout the coding, category, and theme generation process, Jennifer wrote analytic memos [33] that reflected evolving understandings of the themes. The second educational researcher, Jessica Ostrow Michel, served as a peer-debriefer throughout the coding, analytical memo-ing, and drafting of findings.

4. Results

In this section, we address the major themes that emerged around students’ and faculty’s experience and understanding of team-teaching as rendered by the two lead instructors for the energy sustainability and policy course (EARTH/ENVIRON 344). Participants revealed several ways in which “the teamness” in teaching was demonstrated throughout the course with a particular focus on developing students as leaders. The themes included (a) the nature of the co-instructors’ complementary expertise, (b) the structuring and alignment of course content, (c) “linking talk” or the ways in which the co-instructors made connections to each other’s content matter or expertise, (d) the ways in which questions were answered, (e) course assignments/activities, and (f) team-teaching as the optimal approach to content-delivery. In each case, we have presented data to demonstrate how students’ perceptions aligned with the co-instructors’ reflections on how they planned and executed the course.

4.1. Team-Teaching Manifested through Instructors’ Complementary Expertise

It was readily apparent to all participating students that each professor had a distinct though linked area of expertise that was of value in structuring the course and to their learning, with all of them clearly articulating the two sets of expertise the instructors brought to the course. Angela, a final-year engineering student, stated, “I was kind of thinking…that we would have learned more about energy than policy, but they actually had an even balance.” Gillian, a humanities senior stated, “we were able to learn about kind of economics, the science…how do we get oil, how do we get coal—things like that; and then the policy—like what does the government do? What have been recent developments?” Social sciences sophomore, Kiley, reflected that she was able to learn about, “environmental technologies—sort of the general overview of the history of energy use and production and the policy-writing side.” Moreover, in this regard, she thought that the course material was “really well-suited” to being taught by two teachers. Two of the strongest voices were those of Andre, an engineering senior (quoted immediately below), and Kiley, a sophomore and prospective sociology major (who voiced the succeeding quote):

Just the difference in their expertise they have… like being more of an expert on the actual like technical kind of stuff and being expert on the economic stuff versus like political stuff kind of. So just having different kind of levels of depth that they could each reach. So, they kind of divided that amongst themselves; the students got the best experience they could.

I thought it worked really well with the team-taught system where [energy science instructor] had much more sort of expertise in the science side of things and [policy instructor] had much more expertise in the policy writing. And so, I think they complemented each other really well. And it didn’t feel like either of them were ever presenting about something that they didn’t really know about as much.

These two quotes not only conveyed an appreciation for the complementarity of the co-instructors’ expertise, but also demonstrated the participants’ sense of the partnership between the two instructors as a solid one. Andre’s comment regarding the levels of “depth” each professor was able to bring to the teaching of their respective subject areas complements Kiley’s recollection that the instructors never presented material in which their depth of knowledge was lacking. The appreciation for the complementary nature of the co-instructors’ expertise further came to light in students’ expressions regarding team-teaching as the optimal means of content delivery for their energy and policy course. Analysis of the faculty interviews, not surprisingly, reflected that the instructors felt that they shared essential complementary expertise. In this regard, the politics/policy instructor noted:

We have different enough backgrounds that we come at it [from]—like he spent his career going across the world looking at [things] from an economic geology perspective—looking at mining, looking at waste…and then energy resources. Mine has been in the sort of policy realm. So together they at least get two different complementary perspectives.

4.2. Team-Teaching Manifested through Structure and Alignment of Content

All student participants found that the two domains of knowledge reflecting the two content areas of the course were well-structured and aligned. In discussing the lockstep nature with which energy resources and policy were addressed within each week, engineering senior, Angela, stated, “I feel that they themed the weeks very well”. First-year student Sylvia, whose incoming interests were in pre-med/pre-law and whose interest in energy resources had grown as a consequence of taking the course, noted that not only would one learn about an “energy source”, but also, “you would then learn how is that related to politics and public policy”. Further, she stated that this structure “worked flawlessly.” Humanities senior, Gillian noted, “sometimes they don’t directly talk about the same things, but one would lay the framework and the other would take it to applications.” It is worth noting that the two students indicated below made clear reference to and appreciation for the intentionality that the co-instructors demonstrated in structuring the course meaningfully. Kiley, a sophomore with intentions to major in sociology, remarked:

I think the course content really demonstrated a lot like the extent of the collaboration because each lecture so closely mirrored. Like each week, the two lectures were basically about the same topic, but, you know, from different viewpoints and different sort of practical applications. And so, I think the course planning really revealed a lot of collaboration and thoughtful work that makes it fit together.

Angela, engineering senior with interests in clean and renewable energy noted:

So, we’d have like…energy [class session] talked about wind and solar energy—like the generation, how it’s…cost competitive, the pros and cons of the energy sources, and then for the module [memo] that week, it would be in regards to wind and solar, and then a lot of the policy would be focused on…those type of policies that are either implemented or tried to be implemented so that we could see how it all connected. So, I feel like they themed the weeks very well.

Kiley’s comment about the level of “collaboration and thoughtful work” the instructors put into aligning their content areas strongly mirrored that of Angela, who perceived that the co-instructors planned the content delivery/facilitation within each week in such a way that students would be able to readily make the connections between energy sources and policy.

In connection to the structuring and alignment of course content, faculty reported not only engaging in weekly meetings and viewing/participating in each other’s lectures, but also communicating freely whenever the need arose to assure the best alignment between the science and policy content that each presented/discussed on each of their assigned lecture days. This included seeking to ensure that there was minimal redundancy in content covered across their class sessions each week. For example, the policy instructor noted:

I would generally prepare what I was doing in kind of a general sense, and then I’d watch [energy science instructor’s] lecture to try and make sure I was making that connection very explicit.

4.3. Team-Teaching through Linking Talk

Eight of the nine participating students directly addressed how the faculty engaged in talk that linked their own content area to that of their co-instructor or ways in which they referred to each other’s content. One kind of “linking talk” occurred simply in the form of transitional statements where one instructor would signal that his co-instructor would take up some topic during the next class session or that the instructor in question was following up on the topic started by his co-instructor. The second kind of “linking talk” included more substantive comments that helped students to make connections from the energy sources/production to the energy policy aspect of the course and vice versa. Across the two kinds of “linking talk”, some students indicated that this form of communication was also helpful in making them aware that they could anticipate that questions representing the knowledge gap of each instructor would be answered through the teaching of the other instructor during the next class session.

Transitional “linking talk” included statements such as that shared by first-year student, Traci: “Okay you guys learned about how coal works and now I’m going to talk about how coal politics started”. In a similar vein, Andre, engineering senior, remarked, “I think Professor Simon’s [energy] lecture would have been first, so in that case, he would have kind of said that we would touch more on that [policy implications] in the Thursday lecture section.” Implied in these quotes is the notion that students could expect certain knowledge gaps to be filled or certain questions to be answered in the next class session led by the co-instructor. The kind of “linking talk” that helped students make more substantive connections between the energy production and energy policy material included instructors making deeper references to their colleague’s expertise or experiences. Regarding this type of talk, first-year science student, Brenda, noted:

But they would talk a lot about each other and referred to like—I would hear a lot about stuff that [energy science instructor] had done in his career from [policy instructor] and vice versa…Yeah, and it kind of…Yes, they helped me to learn to make connections and also kind of guided our questions because it was like…we kind of knew that if we had a more policy question, [the policy instructor] was the person to answer; if we had a more like how does this work, that was more [energy science instructor’s] expertise.

Similarly, another first-year student, Sylvia noted:

They definitely gave you a broader view and almost engaged you in the other professor’s lecture. And it helped to clarify a lot of questions because if I was learning about an energy resource and I didn’t really understand it, and then I was understanding how it interacts with the government, and there were some technical things in part of those articles, it would help me go back and understand the actual details of that energy resource.

In both of the foregoing examples of deeper “linking talk”, the students were not only able to make deeper connections between energy production and policy, but also develop a greater sense of where to seek further answers—whether it was through approaching the professor with the matching expertise or iteratively engaging between two bodies of knowledge in an independent way. Final-year engineering student, Angela, shared examples of both kinds of “linking talk” within the same statement, as she remarked:

Especially if a student had asked the question, and then they’d be like, “Well, I’ve had this experience, but I know the other professor has done this and you should really ask him about it in the next lecture that you have with him”. Or they’ll be like, “we’ll be talking about this, and the other professor will touch on that tomorrow”.

In the first part of the statement, Angela mentioned one instructor’s sharing of his own experience while also indicating that his co-instructor had a different kind of experience about which the student should inquire to gain further insight. In the second half of the statement, the student referred to a simple transitional comment the instructor made regarding the material that the second instructor would cover in the next class session.

The students’ statements about “linking talk” aligned well with interview revelations from the co-instructors. For example, the policy instructor stated:

I was making that connection very explicit…one is kind of integrating the materials and making sure that it’s not separate chunks, and two, I wanted them to kind of know that it was one class.

The energy science instructor, referring to “linking talk” that allowed students to know that they could anticipate gaps to be filled or questions to be later answered by his co-instructor, stated that he recalled, “saying to students verbally when we would meet through the zoom platform… [policy instructor] will cover this in more detail or please ask [policy instructor] about this”.

4.4. Team Approach to Engaging with Student Questions

With regard to engaging otherwise with students’ questions, five participants spoke favorably about the accessibility of expert responses on the two domains of knowledge constituting the course. Three students who had emailed questions to the instructors noted that they received responses from both instructors as needed. In this regard, first-year student Sylvia noted:

But when I did have a question, I would try my best to ask it to the professor that I thought was most involved with that question and then if they wanted to add on the other professor, they would definitely receive counsel from the other professor about the question.

Similarly, another first-year student, Brenda, noted:

So, if I have to email them, I would email both and then, one time I’d get an email back from [policy instructor] and the other time I’d get an email back from [energy science instructor]. They definitely both looked at the email…and then sometimes [science instructor] would respond and then [policy instructor] had something to add to it. That was really helpful!

As referenced under “linking talk”, faculty let students know that they could anticipate that knowledge gaps would be filled by the other instructor or that they could feel free to directly reach out to have questions answered. In this connection, the energy science instructor noted that he typically modeled to students the posture of a learner and informed them that he was learning from his co-instructors’ specialized expertise as well as from those of energy workers engaged during site visits. Further, it was easy to do this because “neither of them have [sic] big egos” [referencing both past and present co-instructors]. Elaborating on this key co-teaching disposition, he shared that it was critically important that team-teaching faculty be open and honest with students about the limits of their own expertise and emphasize, appropriately and continually, that their teaching partner had the relevant complementary expertise. In his view, this stance communicated to students the importance of disciplinary diversity for effective problem-solving. Moreover, he expressed that ego-expressions driven by the need to be perceived as “knowing it all” should not be allowed to negatively impact the students’ learning experience.

4.5. Team-Teaching through Assignments and Assessments

Team-teaching also appeared in students’ articulations of their experiences of assignments and assessments—the weekly policy memo assignments and tests (midterm and final exam). Of the nine participants, four students commented on “teamness” as manifested both in the weekly policy memos and midterm/finals, four students spoke only about “teamness” as reflected in the policy memo assignments, and two spoke only about exams. Students clearly understood that the policy memos required them to both draw upon their knowledge of energy sources and production as well as on their policy knowledge. Concerning the tests, students referred to evidence that both professors contributed and/or graded specific items. However, there were two students who made it clear that they perceived the test items to be somewhat interrelated as opposed to viewing them as tapping into discrete domains. Regarding the weekly policy memos, senior humanities student Gillian noted that “it was evident in the prompts, the information that we had to go over within the memo—you could see elements of both professors—what they were teaching”. Providing more detail, a first-year student, Sylvia, noted, “You were asked to educate about a certain resource, but then also how that applies to public policy. So, taking both perspectives, both lectures and then using it in your argument”. Traci, a first-year student with interests in biological sciences and medicine, who also conveyed a high value for holistic learning, waxed poetic in an almost philosophical way as she stated:

Well, the modules [policy memos] that we had were just like big overarching assignments based on like holistically on what information we received. Like it was a synthesis assignment—a synthesis and research assignment based on what we learned. So, I think they’re like encouraging like larger projects that like encompass—like you know it’s a topic—the best way is to have multiple teachers teaching, so like that way, you’re not just focusing exclusively on one viewpoint of the issue that you’re trying to track. The multiple professors encourage like a more holistic view or like different points of view to address these issues when you’re writing about them.

Interestingly, the latter student later offered the idea that for “holistic”, “analytical”, or “more writing-based courses” versus “general information overload courses”, she would support “team-taught all the way”.

Regarding examinations, students indicated “teamness” in terms of noticing that some questions fell in one camp of instructor knowledge versus the other or that the grading by each made this evident. Final-year humanities student Gillian noted:

I think it was most evident to me when we were taking our exams, because each professor would write half of the questions and as the grading process happened, they did it over Google Docs, and so I got an email every time one of my questions received comments. And so, I was able to receive alternating comments based on which professor was grading which question. So, I was getting feedback from both of them simultaneously.

The two students who did not see the “teamness” demonstrated simply in terms of the division of the labor of examination design and grading, revealed that they considered at least some examination items to be of a hybrid nature. For example, first-year student Hailey noted:

I think it was also there as well, like for example with the finals, like they had—it was like eight questions and they each kind of graded four, but they all sort of correlated together all the questions. So…it wasn’t like distinctly, “Oh like this one’s Adam’s; this one’s Mike’s” but it was more like fluent.

Andre, an engineering senior, also noted hybridity in the exam questions. Moreover, he saw opportunities to incorporate the content of each aspect of the course across test items. While he indicated that he had been uncertain that it was required that one draw upon both content areas for one’s responses to each item, he indicated that he did so. Further, he assumed that other students took the same approach because it seemed to naturally follow from the way in which the course was instructed.

I would say that because a lot of the questions kind of focused on, I guess one specific aspect, and then to flesh out the question, you can tie in aspects from the other kind of side of things to help make your response a fuller response. But I don’t think it was like—it wasn’t something you had to do. It’s just something that I feel like I did it and I feel like a lot of other people probably ended up doing as well just because it made sense to do that based on how it was taught to us.

Andre’s statement suggested that the integrated nature of the instruction was such that even if a test item did not seem overtly to require integrated content, one almost felt compelled to provide it.

The co-instructors reflected that the division of labor when it came to assignment content and grading duties was relatively equal. The policy instructor noted that the assignments were:

all sort of integrative…so right now they’re writing policy memos to a future potential president of the US, and they have to describe what the natural resources are; so, coal, natural gas, wind, solar, whatever it is.

With regard to grading, the science instructor noted:

You know [policy instructor] and I know each other well enough that when we design assessments, we’re always designing with the other person and our own time in mind. So, we were able to equally divide all of the grading aspects of the course.

4.6. Team-Teaching as Optimal Course Delivery Method

All students identified reasons for which team-teaching was the optimal delivery method for the material they learned in the course and reflected upon how their learning experience would have been diminished had they experienced the content in two separately taught courses. They framed the benefit of team-teaching in terms of how it afforded them the capacity to make connections between the two knowledge domains and/or acquiring a more complete set of knowledge and/or skills. On the matter of enhanced capacity to make connections between the two domains, political science senior Harris noted:

I think…it [two separate courses] would have been more confusing because what [science instructor] focused on and [policy instructor] focused on might not have been the exact same thing [theme]. So, we wouldn’t have had as direct connections, or I wouldn’t have had as direct connection between each subject.

With respect to the knowledge-building aspect, Traci, a first-year student pursuing biological sciences as a path to medicine, reflected on the types of knowledge that she was able to integrate for a more complete connection between energy sources, environmental effects, policy, and systems of government:

I think if it was separate courses, there would be a lot more disconnect between each of these topics—like a lot of things that you don’t quite realize until okay, pollution equals respiratory disease. And guess what? Guess who lives near the pollution. People who don’t have money! Capitalism! So, … it’s a lot more likely to associate in the same part of your brain if it’s during the same course.

Another first-year student, Brenda, who indicated that she would not have taken a policy course on its own given her primary interest in the pure sciences, viewed the team-taught nature of the course as essential to her capacity to write a higher quality policy memo:

And I think that my policy memos would be worse because…the way that [energy science instructor] and [policy instructor] taught was, like… you made policy recommendations and then backed them up by science. So, my policy memos would be a lot weaker if I didn’t have that skillset, because it would just be saying “you should do this or this is what’s going on”, but it wouldn’t have the combination of the two.

The remarks of final year humanities student Gillian helped to elucidate the foregoing and also referenced the impact of team-teaching on both knowledge and skills involved in making policy recommendations:

I think, yeah, I would probably have been able to kind of connect content points between the courses, but the ability to synthesize or maybe make an argument, “Given that the scientific phenomenon is X, an appropriate policy is Y”, I think…it’s something that really happened easily with team-teaching. It would have just taken a lot more time with separate courses.

Notably, while Gillian had had a lot of writing experience and reflected that likely the skills she acquired over time “made it easier to convey the important points in a policy memo”, she noted that she still needed and benefited from feedback as “a policy memo was a genre of writing that I don’t ever do. So, I’m glad I was able to have that experience”.

Not surprisingly, the co-instructors in multiple statements asserted that team-teaching was optimal for facilitating the knowledge and skill development of prospective climate and energy sustainability leaders. In this regard, the energy science instructor noted:

You know, my love of team-teaching is that it allows you to bring—it allows you to focus on the topic of environmental science from multiple perspectives, the social sciences, the humanities, the sciences, the natural sciences, the engineering, to really emphasize the intersectionality…you know, the ways…in which society interacts with our environment and the ecological—you know the ecosystem around us and the intersections among science and policy and legislation at the local, state, and national level…You don’t get that in classes where you’re only focused about one aspect of any particular topic.

In a similar vein, the policy instructor stated:

The sustainability of our energy resources and energy underlines our economy and our economy underlines our way of life, right? So…this isn’t like some tangential topic. This is core to how we function as a species. I mean, we started out in that big picture and to say that, you know, to just analyze this from the perspective of science—natural science is missing, you know, a lot of the picture, right, because just knowing that…the natural gas that’s probably heating or cooling your home right now comes from a fracking operation in Wyoming, that’s fine, you know. That’s good to know the science behind that. But if you don’t understand the sort of geopolitical impacts of that, if you don’t understand how that impacts climate systems, if you don’t know the policies behind that and how the presidential race has an impact on that, then you’re only getting part of the picture.

4.7. Areas of Improvement to Team-Teaching in an Energy Policy Course

The student participants offered no areas for improvement with respect to the team-teaching aspect of the course. Rather, they offered suggestions reflecting content preferences and aspects of activity structure. This is perhaps because both team-teaching and online course-taking were new to most students, and furthermore, they experienced the professors as deeply knowledgeable in their fields as well as being experienced co-teaching collaborators. However, the instructors reflected that it would be ideal for a future online format to be consistently present in the sessions led by each other and hold a third weekly session where they engaged in a fully integrative discussion with students to help them strengthen and more deeply internalize the interdisciplinary connections, problem-conceptualization, and problem-solving approaches. These approaches were taken in the 2021 online version of the course.

5. Limitations

We explored team-teaching in the context of a single energy policy course within a single institution. Thus, we did not compare or explore how other iterations of team-teaching might function to support students’ development of energy and climate literacy. Therefore, care must be taken in generalizing the findings. Rather, the present findings may help to inform studies in other contexts that will help to expand the research corpus on team-teaching on energy sustainability and climate change. Additionally, this course took place during an unusual time (during the COVID-19 pandemic), and thus, the elements that typically occur in this field-based course (e.g., continuous integrative teaching moments permeating formal class sessions, informal conversations outside class time, engagement with stakeholders via energy site visits, post-visit debriefings, et cetera) were reduced. Moreover, there was less interaction among the students than in the immersive field experiences that normally constitute this course. In addition, while the two professors come from different fields and backgrounds, they are both White men with faculty-level incomes and, thus, do not represent the full diversity of players in the energy science and policy fields. However, the co-instructors provided balance by including guests with a variety of lived experiences and from less advantaged groups who engaged with students. For example, the instructors exposed students to the voices of other professionals from the field by sharing the perspectives of energy plant employees and by providing a slate of guest speakers with intentional consideration for gender balance. Further, they enhanced the energy justice component of the course by drawing on cases from multiple geographical locations across the USA familiar to students. That said, we also appreciate that courses like EARTH/ENVIRON 344 could potentially be enhanced by intentionally adding critical frameworks, such as decolonizing lenses, to the toolkit of the instructors.

Regarding methodological considerations, we relied on participant self-report and did not engage in observations that might have added context and nuance to the findings. However, given that we employed in-depth interviews rather than relying solely on descriptive survey data or faculty reflection, we yielded rich experiential data from each participant that converged to reveal common themes.

6. Discussion

We conducted the present inquiry to explore how team-taught interdisciplinary courses facilitate students’ development as leaders/potential leaders in energy resource sustainability. As students shared their experiences of interdisciplinary teaching and learning, they revealed that the interdisciplinary instruction provided by the energy science and policy instructors furnished them with a deeper understanding of the essentialness of being holistically informed on energy resource sustainability. Such interdisciplinary literacy is foundational to developing future energy sustainability and climate leaders. Further, the students found that engaging with this integrated course material informed their capacity to write policy memos that constituted the central integrative assignment of the course. These memos, which were assigned weekly, provided students with consistent practice in applying their integrated knowledge of energy resources, politics, and human impacts to making evidence-based energy policy analyses and recommendations—a critical prerequisite to energy literacy and leadership skill development.

7. Implications

7.1. Summary of Findings

The themes around students’ perceptions of team-teaching reveal that not only was “teamness” demonstrated through balanced and/or complementary content, but was also revealed through the creation of assignments and assessments with constructivist features that required students to actively engage with and integrate the two disciplines to explore and respond to authentic problems. Further, the ways in which the students addressed, with varying degrees of intensity of expression, the structure and alignment of course content and “linking talk” revealed the deliberate and intentional work on the part of the instructors in optimizing their capacity to make linkages between their knowledge of energy resources/production and energy policy. For example, “linking talk” helped students to actively engage in their own work of bridging between disciplines.

Thus, students found that they were able to use policy content that included technical references to illuminate their understanding of the science (energy components) and vice versa. These connections were reinforced by the policy memos that engaged students in constructivist learning activities, such as group discussion, role-playing, and providing peer critique. Additionally, students found that course assessments reflected both disciplines and that they could readily access interdisciplinary responses to their clarifying questions from the co-instructors. Both the students’ and co-instructors’ interview responses demonstrated that the intentionality of the team-teaching was readily accessible to the students. Finally, all themes converged towards the notion that team-teaching is the optimal means to assist students in developing knowledge and skills that form the foundation for energy resource sustainability leadership.

7.2. Interdisciplinary Teaching as a Pathway for Cultivating Leadership

It is important for students, as developing leaders, to actively engage with multiple disciplinary perspectives so that they acquire the multiple lenses through which to frame, explore, and make evidence-based objective decisions/recommendations on environmental and sustainability issues. Moreover, constructivist approaches that involve students’ grappling with authentic real-world problems (in preparation to become future leaders), individually and collectively, must be a central feature of the teaching and learning experience. While interdisciplinary programs and departments have existed for some time now, there is a lack of true curricular integration that is the hallmark of the best sustainability leadership programs [34]. Rather, students are more typically engaged in multidisciplinary learning, which means that they are taking a number of courses in required disciplinary clusters. However, calls for increased curricular and instructional integration have arisen given the pressing needs both in professional and civic spaces for individuals with knowledge and leadership skills that reflect integrated perspectives [2]. For students to meaningfully develop and apply sustainability leadership skills, whether in personal/social, professional, or civic/grassroots contexts, opportunities to impactfully experience integrated sustainability-related curriculum and instruction are required.

When faculty from multiple relevant disciplines and perspectives co-plan and execute curriculum, constructivist course activities, and assignments with intentional pedagogical work that integrates multiple disciplines, students are able to more readily develop the interdisciplinary sustainability literacy that gives rise to the emergence of interdisciplinary sustainability leadership skills. As these students are being prepared to address the “wicked problems” of sustainability and climate change, this pedagogical approach directly relates to the skills needed in the field. The environmental and energy field is inherently interdisciplinary, and employers often cite the need to be able to think and act across traditional disciplines and boundaries [2]. Alumni from this course anecdotally report that the leadership skills cultivated through this team-based interdisciplinary teaching translated into professional success. We recommend that future studies formally explore the latter line of inquiry.

This study demonstrates that collaborative team-teaching undertaken by faculty from different but complementary disciplines is experienced by students as a powerful teaching–learning modality—fostering an impactful, engaging, and connected learning experience for budding leaders that most participants could not imagine being achieved through taking an energy course and a policy course separately. In fact, participants viewed team-teaching as ideal for meaningfully engaging in the course material. However, at U-M and most institutions of higher education, truly integrated team-teaching across disciplines is rare. This is not because team-teaching has been demonstrated to be ineffective. Rather, the absence of team-teaching at U-M and other institutions is rooted in policies for allocating teaching credit that assume a team-taught course requires only fifty-percent effort by each faculty member. The perception is that two faculty who team-teach a class split the term, and each teaches half of the term. Thus, the faculty should only get credit for teaching half the class. This perception of the team-teaching effort is the opposite of how EARTH/ENVIRON 344 is taught, as illustrated in this paper. This and other studies e.g., [26] demonstrate that students emerge from collaborative team-taught courses with a stronger appreciation for the connectedness of material than they do if they take two separate classes. Students in a collaborative team-taught class achieve higher levels of synthesis and integration. Further, they benefit from the intellectual partnership of the faculty who engage in and embrace an interactive teaching model.

The impact of interdisciplinary team-teaching on students’ appreciation for the connectedness of energy science and the policy context has implications for the improvement of teaching to prepare energy sustainability and climate change leaders at U-M, other US institutions, and internationally. Institutions ought to restructure the faculty reward structure to incentivize faculty to engage in team-teaching. Incentivizing team-taught courses by more equitably rewarding faculty who teach them holds promise to improve the teaching quality of participating instructors and, thus, student learning [35]. Consequently, increasing students’ opportunities to take team-taught courses may contribute to developing future generations of climate change leaders prepared to tackle unprecedented challenges and cultivate a more sustainable future. The authors recognize that team-teaching is a bigger investment in time and financial resources, particularly in curriculum development and planning, so the demonstrable benefits to team-teaching must be balanced with other considerations. We recommend prioritizing team-teaching at the earliest and latest stages in academic programs since these tend to be the most formative in terms of the development of literacy and learning preferences.

8. Conclusions

The present inquiry employed in-depth interviews of students and faculty to illuminate how a team-taught interdisciplinary course facilitates students’ development as leaders in energy resource sustainability and climate change. Our central focus was on the ways in which team-teaching helped to facilitate students’ construction of a body of energy literacy (knowledge, attitudes, and skills) that is foundational to energy and climate leadership. Because much of the literature on team-teaching for sustainability is reflective and descriptive and often does not include researcher perspectives outside of the instructors who co-developed and team-taught the courses, we have added methodological value both by employing in-depth interviews and education researchers who were not part of the teaching team.

Broadly, our findings revealed that there were several ways in which students experienced “teamness” as evidenced by their recognition of its presence in the course planning, instruction, and activities. Having analyzed and presented rich qualitative data that serves to illuminate the emerging elements of “teamness” in team-teaching, our study makes a valuable contribution to the literature on team-teaching on energy sustainability-related topics. Indeed, students revealed ways in which the “teamness” in the co-instructors’ team-teaching helped them to meaningfully engage with the course and advance their literacy on energy and climate science as it interacts with the complex policy context. The reflections they shared in the interview process revealed strong endorsement of the impact of team-teaching on their energy and climate policy literacy—a literacy foundational to the development of energy resource sustainability and climate leadership. Among participant reflections were those indicating that in absence of the energy–climate-policy team-teaching and learning experience, they would not have been as well equipped to undertake the central learning activity/assessment—that of drafting policy memos, in which they were in effect undertaking energy resource and sustainability/climate leadership roles.

While the present study focused specifically on the impact of team-teaching on students’ engagement with integrated course material meant to support the goal of fostering the sustainability literacy that undergirds energy sustainability leadership, we hope to advance this research with a future study that focuses on the specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students acquired through the course. Further, given that the studied iteration of this course was facilitated virtually rather than in an in-person, field context as it is customarily taught, a comparative analysis of students’ learning experiences across these locations is an additional line of inquiry that would be fruitful to pursue. Moreover, future research could benefit from employing a semi-structured observational protocol of teaching and learning activities employed in team-teaching to provide greater context for the analysis of both faculty and student self-reported interview data.