Interdomain Course Development

After transitioning to the College of Arts & Architecture at Penn State, one of my first course projects was proposing, designing, and developing an introductory course in art therapy. The course would be a general education offering, and it would help students meet their “IS” requirement (integrative studies) which was a recent addition the gen ed curriculum at the time. Undergraduates need to take a certain number of IS credits to fulfill gen ed requirements, in alignment with the university’s strategic plan to encourage cross-disciplinary thinking and approaches to complex issues. Our college is uniquely positioned to provide interdisciplinary perspectives on an array of topics.

We contracted with a licensed art therapist who acted as the subject matter expert, and I provided the learning sciences lens to the partnership. Over the course of six months, we co-wrote the proposal to be examined and approved by our university’s faculty senate curricular affairs committee and piloted the course in Spring 2019. This process involved working with the SME, who did not have a background in education, to develop learning goals and appropriate assessments, and mapping the outcomes to the general education learning objectives framework to illustrate how the course fit into the IS requirements.

Supporting Materials (coming soon): Interdomain objectives map Sample Syllabus