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Detective Fiction and Forensics in collaboration.

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Abstract

This case study focuses on the link between Detective Fiction, a literature course, and Forensics, a lab science course, and how this cluster allows students to evaluate criminal investigation from two disciplinary perspectives.

Learning is not a spectator sport. It requires students' direct and active involvement and participation.

--Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec Cooperative Learning in the Classroom

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Westminster College kept the above philosophy firmly in mind when it changed its general education curriculum in the mid-1990s. Faculty and students alike felt the structural shift from individualist to cooperative and collaborative learning, from competitive teaching and learning environments to team-based teaching and learning environments. This new structure challenged the entire campus community to reach across long-established pedagogical boundaries and beliefs, bring connections between disciplines into sharp focus, and move toward what Kenneth Bruffee calls an environment in which students can "govern themselves in a context of substantive engagement, conversation, and negotiation" (89). To launch a curricular change of this scale and to demonstrate the possibilities of interdisciplinary cooperative and collaborative learning communities, Westminster introduced the cluster course--two courses from two different disciplines offered in the same semester, taken by the same group of students and linked, for example, by common themes, topics, goals, outcomes, shared assignments, presentations, papers, or exams. The Detective Fiction and Forensics cluster, the subject of our case study here, demonstrates that the shift from old to new paradigms of teaching, like the one that Johnson, Johnson, and Smith lay out in Active Learning: Cooperation in the College Classroom (6-12), is possible not only within one college classroom but also within an interdisciplinary structure.

Like cooperative and collaborative learning, the cluster is not a new concept. In 1975, Clark University initially developed a model for clustering courses through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Anderson 311). Since its inception, several variations on the original cluster concept have been put into practice. UCLA, for instance, offers a three quarter cluster course for first year students as part of the general education curriculum which focuses on an interdisciplinary topic and is team-taught by four faculty from different areas of expertise (Cornwell 9). At Babson College, the cluster model is used to integrate professional education and liberal education, sharing common content among three different courses (Anderson 317). Wesminster's cluster model links two courses from two different disciplines. By confining the cluster to two courses, a balanced is achieved between depth in a single discipline and interdisciplinary investigation.

With the two course model, the two professors teaching the courses can often attend each other's classes and participate in discussions and in-class activities. In this way, the students see faculty as learners too, sharing the risks of looking at something in a new way, asking questions, and applying knowledge to wider contexts. The faculty meet with the students twice as much as they normally would in a semester, and, consequently, get to know them better. Because the students are together more, working toward common goals, they also get to know each other well. The result is a supportive, safe atmosphere that encourages...

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