Rachel DeSoto-Jackson (Theatre, Dance, and Performance), Paige Matzerath (SAHE '20), Emily Ostrowski (SAHE '20), and Mimi Benjamin (Student Affairs in Higher Education) coauthored a book chapter that was included in Integrating Professional Skills into Undergraduate Chemistry Curricula, published in early December of 2020.
The chapter, “Teaching Teamwork through Theater: Interdisciplinary Collaboration in a General Education Course,” offers an approach to teaching team skills in an interdisciplinary classroom within a general education course. Using THTR 161 Introduction to Theater: Interpersonal Practices, the methods identified offer STEM educators a pathway for the inclusion of team skills within required courses students take before reaching discipline-specific courses. The exercises identified through theatrical collaboration team activities demonstrate a model for team-based learning (TBL) that may be adapted and applied within other courses or team projects.
In Part I of this chapter, the THTR 161 course instructor (DeSoto-Jackson) outlines the course design and instructional methods employed in the course. Part II reports the data collection and assessment of the course in fall 2019, conducted by an assessment team addressing multiple team-based courses (Matzerath, Ostrowski, and Benjamin). This is followed by recommendations for development that were implemented by DeSoto-Jackson in spring 2020 with additional data collection.