General education requirements at the research university typically consist of 15-20 credits in each of the subject areas within the College of Arts and Sciences - e.g. Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities. Students generally satisfy these requirements by taking mass lecture classes, typically greater than 200 students, in X101: Physics 101, Sociology 101, History 101, etc. The underlying goal of this general education model is to provide students with an education that is broader than their own interests.

While the goal is laudable, the X101 structure is far removed from the ideal of a meaningful education. The current world of research and scholarship is no longer so easily divided into distinct disciplinary areas, and it is becoming increasingly complex as the problems under study become more intertwined. New avenues of exploration related, for example, to global change, cognitive processing, and environmental problem solving are all interdisciplinary in nature. Equally important, as we continue to teach the world in isolated pieces, we also continue to treat the students in the same way, grading them on the basis of their ability to memorize and repeat isolated facts. This approach is at odds with the real world where graduates from our institutions are expected to function well in a complex, team-oriented work place. Yet we never teach Collaboration 101 as part of general education. At the same time, the mass lecture approach suffers from a number of well known pedagogical problems, including, but not limited to a) encouraging passivity in students, b) encouraging wholesale student memorization as the lecture content is mostly static in nature, c) vesting the instructor as the primary information source, d) largely eliminating cooperative or peer learning possibilities and e) poorly serving the wide range of student learning styles.

Hence, mass lecture X101 represents a single approach to teaching and assessment that could lead to failure for many students who would be better served by a more diversified approach to learning. Moreover, within the X101 structure prior conceptual frameworks are rarely challenged, and these preconceptions in turn prevent students from assimilating new concepts. This situation cries out for a new approach. I propose the development of a new era of general education courses that are interdisciplinary in nature, are taught by a faculty team, and emphasize collaborative inquiry and presentation on the part of the students. Out of such a structure, a true learning community could emerge, enabling the traditional barriers between professors and students to erode and instructional technology as a collaborative tool to finally take its proper place in higher education.

Barriers to Change

Before implementing an interdisciplinary general education sequence based on collaborative learning, we must address several major barriers, reflecting both cultural and institutional patterns that act as disincentives to change. These barriers have become manifest to me in the course of my career as a result of actually teaching interdisciplinary courses, being an early adopter of instructional technology as a means of enhancing student-student collaboration and being a persistent pain in the neck to deans and other administrators. However, it is possible to overcome such barriers by developing robust strategies to enable implementation, as evidenced by some successful examples.

Faculty Mindset
Last year I did a survey of faculty at the University of Oregon, with results of some relevance here. I found that faculty are frequently reluctant to teach general education courses, perceiving them merely as a necessary service load for their department. They also seem particularly reluctant to teach formal interdisciplinary general education courses. This reluctance stems partly from a lack of time to develop new courses, especially those requiring new thinking about how to teach. It may also stem from a lack of understanding of the structure of an interdisciplinary course sequence and a sense that they do not know how to design such a course.

Student Expectations
Students can potentially play a large role in institutional reform. While student demonstrations against "spoon-fed knowledge" classes have yet to materialize, a growing number of students really want to be exposed to material in new and different ways. However, many students persist in the mentality that they will acquire knowledge by memorizing the lectures and the text, and will manifest this knowledge by performance on individual assessment tools. A sobering reminder occurred in 1998 when I taught a history/ philosophy of science class with another faculty member. The course was set up to expose students to scientific debate centered around ambiguous data (e.g. geocentric vs. heliocentric solar systems, the age of the earth, evolution and natural selection, the expanding universe). This approach worked well for the top 20% of the class. But the remainder of the class is best represented by this comment from the student evaluations:
"Throughout this class there were often two opposing and conflicting views on a particular subject and it was never clear who was right and what we were supposed to know. The class would have been simpler for me if there was just one professor presenting information." Our students are so pre-programmed to respond to a single point of information that multiple 'experts' placed in front of them can confuse rather than enlighten them.

Sustainability and Balance
While there is recognition that the mass lecture X101 approach to general education is flawed, there is also skepticism that another structure can be implemented. At the heart of this skepticism is the issue of sustainability of courses as well as the total balance of all courses. One issue is whether or not interdisciplinary general education courses can be sufficiently standardized so that they can be offered across years and faculty in a predictable fashion. Proposed interdisciplinary course sequences will not be taken seriously as meeting university requirements unless sustainability can be demonstrated and redundancy with other courses eliminated. Certainly, movement to interdisciplinary general education courses could threaten the sustainability of the X101 courses, upsetting long established balances, but this is the price to pay for significant rethinking of curriculum sequencing.

Student Credit Hour Funding
Departments are often funded directly on the basis of the number of student credit hours (SCH) they generate. In a worst case, this leads to empty-headed courses taken by thousands of students a year (e.g., The Physics of Sex). If this hypothetical course existed, it could potentially rob other departments of SCH funding and this naturally creates defensive faculty. As a result, when new interdisciplinary courses are proposed, departments, worrying about loss of SCH and funds, may claim territorial rights to the proposed subject matter. Another issue of SCH-based funding is that it may or may not make provision for team teaching courses. Any such provisions may be viewed as incentives or disincentives for partnering. In addition, SCH-based funding seems to strongly reward departments for offering X101, even if it has zero pedagogical value.

Physical Infrastructure
Most university classrooms are box-like structures with students limited to fixed seating in a crowded room with a mumbling professor at the front. If we are interested in using collaborative learning as a framework for launching interdisciplinary general education classes, we need classroom space that has a better layout. While the renovation of campus space can be expensive and controversial, we can no longer afford to underestimate the effect of the box-like lecture hall in demoralizing student learning. The creation of more flexible learning spaces and the use of technology to increase the potential for collaborative work can have a significant impact on student learning.

Strategies for Overcoming Barriers

The barriers I have described range from perceptions of students and faculty to structural barriers in the funding of undergraduate education. In some instances, perceptions are formed by structure.

One of the biggest hurdles is simply the crisis of imagination in developing interdisciplinary courses. The default view is that interdisciplinarity is more easily achieved in areas with common modes of thought, for example, in the sciences where one can envision effective collaboration between life scientists and physical scientists in addressing the origin of life issues or in the social sciences in exploring how societies influence economic forms. Collaborations between physical scientists and economists are much harder to imagine, although individual faculty creativity can produce any kind of interdisciplinary marriage.

Perhaps the most successful strategy when envisioning an interdisciplinary course is to identify some intellectual thread and then build material around that thread. Examples of topics that would readily lend themselves to such an approach include:
Energy Deregulation: A course on this subject could address the physical and social parameters of the problem of production in a high energy-consumptive society. It might draw on faculty from humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.
The Moment of Discovery: How does the brain go through a process that produces discovery? How does it free itself of biases in order to reach discovery? Is the moment of discovery any different for a scientist than an artist? Faculty from natural sciences, psychology, neurology, and fine arts could bring their disciplinary perspectives to bear on this subject.
The thread concept is the basis for the successful implementation of interdisciplinary general education clusters at UCLA (http://www.college.ucla.edu/ge/), an "overnight" innovation that actually took eight years to evolve from concept to a well-developed and established general education option. UCLA's team-taught clusters allow students to connect with the "scholarship of ideas" rather than memorizing the individual spin of a particular professor. This approach creates a rich opportunity for curriculum redesign and forming new partnerships with other faculty.

Sustainability for such courses can be addressed if the theme of the course is sufficiently broad and the syllabus flexible, provided there is a sufficient core of faculty with relevant interests. The courses need not be identical from year to year. Stony Brook's course in "The Social Dimensions of Science" (http://www.wise.sunysb.edu/) offers a good example of this approach. Faculty help students deal with ambiguity by emphasizing the variety of points of view that occur when science and society interweave. Since there are no hard and fast answers, as those in science have perhaps come to expect from their more focused courses, faculty need to give special attention to the frustrations students may experience with ambiguity.

The University of Oregon provides a somewhat different approach through its Pathways program, in which courses from different disciplines are tied together in some common theme, such as Science, Law and Culture (http://www.uoregon.edu/~pathway/). Pathways are largely constructed by combining extant departmental courses, rather than by the creation of explicitly interdisciplinary courses. However, the Pathways concept represents real opportunity for the construction of the kind of interdisciplinary learning environment that I am proposing. The University provided incentive funding for departments that were willing to get together to create new kinds of learning opportunities for students. As a result, students taking a two-year Pathway will satisfy the bulk of their general education requirements in the context of a connected pathway through thematically linked courses.

Overcoming structural problems related to funding of departments requires considerable pro-activity on the part of the administration. The Pathways example given above shows how incentives can be used effectively, but we are still working on how participation in a Pathway can be viewed as more beneficial for departments than simply enrolling hundreds of students in X101. A more radical approach would be if Departments actually could get incentive funding to the point where X101 is financially unfavorable compared to participation in the Pathway concept.

The University of Oregon also provides an example of creative use of physical space to encourage collaboration. One such classroom can be viewed at: http://c204cam.uoregon.edu. This wireless laptop classroom (with 40 available laptops) also serves as a general classroom for instructors who want to form student collaborative learning groups. Indeed, the room's design is sufficiently subversive that giving a traditional lecture is difficult. While not yet fully addressing the question of lecture halls for 200+ students, it gives us some pointers for new directions.

Summing Up

In sum, research universities can now choose whether to continue the post-World War II, X101 model for their general educational requirements, or to move in a completely new direction that allows students to fulfill their general education requirements in a truly interdisciplinary fashion. The former method clearly has shortcomings and is unlikely to contribute very much to the students' overall learning at the University. The latter, in contrast, has much potential to give students an experience more connected to the real world and to teach them valuable collaboration and communication skills. Although the barriers to reforming general education are large, they are not insurmountable. Success requires the recognition that the previous practice of X101 has reached its natural limit and a commitment by both faculty and administration to develop new modes of learning.

UCLA's effort to introduce interdisciplinary teaching and learning into its general education curriculum is centered in the General Education (GE) "cluster" program of the College of Letters and Science. This program - more fully described in a previous Spotlight (http://www.sunysb.edu/reinventioncenter/spotlight.html#gecluster) -- offers UCLA's incoming freshmen the option of enrolling in a yearlong, collaboratively-taught, interdisciplinary course that is focused on a topic of timely importance such as the "Global Environment" or "Interracial Dynamics." Since 1997, eleven of these innovative clusters have been developed and over 3000 freshman students have enrolled in them. Approximately 25% of entering students enrolled in 2000-2001; the goal is to offer enough clusters so that half the class can enroll.

As Greg Bothun humorously notes in his essay, the development and implementation of this GE cluster program has not been an "overnight" affair. Rather, it has been a time-consuming, labor intensive, and not inexpensive ten-year process aimed at changing the ways in which faculty, graduate student instructors, and first-year students approach general education teaching and learning. Along the way, we have encountered many of the same barriers that Professor Bothun mentions: faculty skepticism, student confusion, resource and space concerns. We have employed a variety of strategies in overcoming these challenges:

Securing High-Level Administrative Support: The easiest way to get department chairs and their faculty colleagues engaged in any kind of curricular initiative is to secure a measure of support from some of the principal players in a university's central administration. In the case of UCLA, the Provost of the College of Letters and Science, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and the former and current Chancellors were all committed to strengthening the university's general education curriculum.

Workgroups and Proposals for Change: A key advantage in securing high-level administrative support for general education reform is that chancellors and provosts can appoint blue-ribbon workgroups of department chairs, faculty, and student representatives to examine the GE curriculum and make broad recommendations for its improvement. Provost Brian Copenhaver took this approach at UCLA by appointing two such workgroups in 1994-95 and 1995-96. Out of these groups came the proposal for a new GE curriculum based on interdisciplinary general education cluster courses.

Campus Forums: Far-reaching proposals for curricular change have the potential to generate considerable discussion among faculty. At UCLA, the idea of a GE curriculum based on cluster courses generated a series of campus-wide forums. Many of the faculty who were involved in these discussions later went on participate in the cluster program.

Funding for GE Initiatives, or "Show me the money!" While discussion about interdisciplinary education is important, the provision of tangible rewards for teaching these kinds of courses is critical in changing faculty attitudes towards them. The Chancellor allocated permanent funding to strengthen undergraduate education, which made the cluster initiative possible. This money allowed us to offer faculty members course releases from departmental teaching, summer salary for cluster development, graduate student support, administrative assistance, budgets for social events and field trips, and public recognition for their participation in the cluster program.

Cultivating New Communities of Teaching and Learning: Developing a yearlong collaboratively taught interdisciplinary cluster course normally takes two years. The complexity of the process underscored the need to create a supportive community of scholar-teachers skilled in designing and teaching these courses. To achieve this end, The Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education submitted a successful proposal to the Hewlett Foundation for money to fund a range of programs aimed at engaging 120 to 140 faculty in GE cluster development. This funding was used from 1994 to 1996 to support a series of workshops and "affinity group" activities that addressed the challenges of designing and teaching in interdisciplinary general education courses. These events featured lectures on the intellectual aims and consequences of general education such scholars as Joyce Appleby (UCLA), Alexander W. Astin (UCLA), Leon Lederman (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), Richard Light (Harvard University),
Elizabeth Neufeld (UCLA), Frank Rhodes (Cornell University), John A Warden III (Venturist, Inc.), Cornel West (Harvard University), James Q. Wilson (UCLA), and Robert Winter (UCLA). Between 1999 and 2001, 161 faculty members at UCLA participated in these events. Four of our current eight clusters and their teaching teams emerged from this process.

Assessing the Cluster Experience: Given the expense and difficulty of mounting general education interdisciplinary courses, assessment has been central to the cluster program. The UCLA undergraduate education evaluation and research office assessed the experiences of cluster freshmen, graduate student instructors, and faculty. Its findings have not only confirmed the overall benefits of this approach to general education, but also provided a wealth of material regarding the kinds of pedagogical practices that work best in these kinds of interdisciplinary collaboratively-taught courses. One recent change acknowledges the writing-intensive nature of cluster courses, so that beginning in 2002-2003 students who complete a three-course cluster receive credit for their second intensive writing course requirement ("Writing II").

While the aforementioned activities enabled us to successfully launch and maintain our GE cluster program, we have also learned over the last decade that this kind of curricular reform is an ongoing, continually-evolving process. In the end, our efforts to change the practice of teaching and learning in general education remain a work-in-progress.

For more information, please contact Greg Kendrick in the UCLA College of Letters and Science (gregk@college.ucla.edu) or see the Web site: http://www.college.ucla.edu/ge/.

University of Michigan Global Change Curriculum

The three-semester, interdisciplinary course sequence "Introduction to Global Change" at the University of Michigan is a decade-old journey into inquiry-based, undergraduate curriculum development. Consultations with academic advisors and teaching experiences in introductory science courses have made it clear that students entering the university are often deterred from concentrating in the sciences because they are unsure of what they would focus on and instead tend to label themselves as "pre-med" or other pre-professional titles. By offering two complementary but independent introductory courses in global change issues at the incoming level, one offering natural science credit and one offering social science credit, even students who are only attracted by distribution requirements are exposed to exciting fields of research and modern scientific developments, which they might otherwise not have found in a pre-concentration track.

The activity, originating from the grassroots of faculty enthusiasm and perceived need, reaches beyond the normal challenges of undergraduate teaching: it includes a comprehensive evaluation effort, a dissemination and outreach program, a university-wide effort to reform undergraduate education, and Web-based interaction with students. Its aim was the early capture of student interest in interdisciplinary study. The curriculum draws on the knowledge and viewpoints of the Departments of Anthropology, Biology, Geology, and Sociology in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts; the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Science in the College of Engineering; the School of Public Health; and the School of Natural Resources and Environment. Breaking new ground in structure, content and pedagogical methodology, the sequence has experienced a steady increase in student enrollment to its current maximum of 250, as well as continued evolution of its intellectual content. It has attracted widespread attention for its innovative, technology-based approach and interdisciplinary perspectives. Most notably, the program offers a "front-loaded" Global Change minor, which engages motivated students in their first year of study and can be completed in two or three years; approximately 25 students enroll each year.

Faculty commitment, Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) involvement and upper-level institutional support have been central to these achievements. Senior faculty initiated the course, adding it to their regular course loads. Development has benefited from the support of the Provost, various Deans, the Vice President for Research, the G. Whitaker Fund and Center for Research on Learning and Teaching [http://www.crlt.umich.edu/] at the University of Michigan, and from external funding from the National Science Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The major implementation hurdles stemmed from the need to overcome departmental barriers for awarding teaching credit and the extra work entailed by interdisciplinary team-teaching. Faculty in interdisciplinary courses cannot teach in a vacuum; they must be familiar not only with their own material but also with that of the other instructors. This burden is not reflected, however, in the amount of 'teaching credit' awarded by the University; each faculty member receives only a percentage of the course rather than receiving credit for one entire course or, as is the case at some institutions, double credit - which more accurately reflects the amount of time and effort required.

The faculty workload was somewhat reduced by the use of graduate students to help develop and run the labs, put the lecture notes online, and maintain other technical components. Both faculty and graduate students attend regular team meetings and retreats, and conform to a specified format of integrated course topics and presentations. The courses are taught only by senior faculty with tenure who do not need to worry about "what the chair thinks" and can afford to put time into course development. The students' resulting access to senior faculty is a strong intellectual selling point for the program.

It is enormously difficult under the current departmental and divisional structure of most universities to assign teaching credits to individual faculty members from different departments who are teaching a course together, especially when the course is not housed in a specific department. In an ideal world, funding and teaching load/ FTE allocations would follow individual faculty members and faculty should be able to teach in any department of the university without concern for which division or department will get credit for that teaching. This model is extremely attractive to Provosts and other high-level administrators, because the bottom-line numbers do not change. It is unattractive to Deans, however, because they fear "losing control" of their faculty and losing enrollment numbers in their departments.

The faculty overcame this challenge through their dedication and willingness to contribute time and energy as well as through sheer force of character. They declared their intention to carry out this initiative and were supported by the Provost, who recognized the growing importance of interdisciplinarity to both research and teaching and provided a small budget for summer salary followed by additional funds in order to sustain the program once it was established. While outside grants were central to starting up the new curriculum, developing the minor and capstone experience, and permitting smaller classes, they do not provide funds to maintain activities and thus University support was vital to continuing the program.

In spite of these hurdles, the faculty who initiated the curriculum felt that it represented a valuable educational opportunity for students and helped to address the ambivalence between teaching and research that characterizes the university environment. Science faculty see increasing interdisciplinary connections in their work and are increasingly likely to work together; there is also increasing interest in linking the social sciences to the sciences and to one another. A new buzzword among scientists is "interdisciplinarity before disciplinarity," reflecting the need to put the context first and develop an integrated view before a specialized one. Both faculty and students benefit from incorporating these connections into undergraduate education, although in order to do so successfully, universities need to adjust their existing reward structures and break down artificial barriers between departments and divisions.

For more information about the Global Change Curriculum, contact Ben van der Pluijm, Professor of Geology, at globalchange@umich.edu or vdpluijm@umich.edu, or see the Web site: http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/.

The Global Change Curriculum was also profiled by the National Institute for Science Education at the University of Wisconsin. See the Case Study Report, "The University of Michigan's Global Change I Course: A Technology-Enhanced, Interdisciplinary Learning Environment": http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/nise/cl1/ilt/case/michigan/michigan.htm.

University of Texas at Austin Connexus: Making Connections in Undergraduate Studies

Connexus was developed to weave together the vast UT undergraduate curricula and to position students for an education that reflects the opportunities of a large research university. Two of its main programs are the Forum Seminars and Bridging Disciplines Programs. A third program, Connexus Clusters, is in early stages of development. These approaches to providing an integrative interdisciplinary experience offer students both one-semester and more extensive options.

Forum Seminars introduce freshmen and sophomores to the University's resources through weekly discussions with faculty from a range of departments and research units. Organized around contemporary social and intellectual issues, these one-hour courses allow students from a variety of colleges to study complex topics such as "The Science of Environmental Change" and "Technology and the Global Community" using interdisciplinary approaches. The seminars meet for two hours a week during the first half of the semester and feature discussions with faculty from a variety of departments. After completing a Forum Seminar, students who seek a more extensive interdisciplinary experience can move into the Connexus Clusters and/or the Bridging Disciplines Programs.

Connexus Clusters allow students at all levels, from freshman to seniors, to take simultaneously 2 or 3 thematically linked courses in a single semester, using one course-identification number. Each course within the Cluster typically satisfies an area requirement. Students who enroll in a Forum Seminar or Connexus Cluster are well positioned for one of the Bridging Disciplines Programs.

The Bridging Disciplines Programs (BDPs) integrate cross-disciplinary general education with the major by organizing area requirements, electives, major requirements, internships and research experiences around an interdisciplinary theme. Each BDP consists of four-to-six courses that provide multiple disciplinary perspectives on a topic, along with two to three research and internship experiences that tie the topic to the student's major. A Government major, for instance, pursuing a BDP in "Children and Society" might first enroll in a Connexus Cluster that links the Forum Seminar on Children and Society with a Sociology course on Juvenile Delinquency. In subsequent semesters the student could continue to take courses on children while participating in faculty research on children and public policy. Later, the student might find an internship with the Children's Defense Fund. Other BDPs enable students to participate in faculty research at the University's Environmental Science Institute (http://www.geo.utexas.edu/esi/index.html) or the Population Research Center (http://www.prc.utexas.edu/index.html), or to study abroad at the Santa Chiara Center in Castiglione Fiorentino, Italy. Students are encouraged to enroll in a BDP starting in their freshman or sophomore years, and no later than their junior year; those completing a BDP receive a certificate at graduation.

Five-to-seven Forum Seminars and ten Connexus Clusters are currently offered each semester. Enrollment is limited to 50 students per Forum Seminar and 5 to 10 students per Connexus Cluster. Six BDPs are available. Enrollment in each BDP is limited to 20 additional students per year.

The Forum Seminar, Connexus Cluster, and BDPs Programs are all organized around six broad interdisciplinary topics: Children and Society; Cultural Studies; Environment; Ethics and Leadership; Technology and Society; and Population and Public Policy. The topics reflect areas of abundant course offerings, innovative faculty research, and long-standing cross-disciplinary collaboration. Thus the programs take full advantage of existing resources. The only new, specially created courses are the Forum Seminars, which form the building blocks introducing students to the Cluster and BDP Programs. Each BDP area was developed with the help of an eight-to-ten-person multi-disciplinary faculty panel convened by the Provost's office. One or two BDP panel members lead the Forum Seminar and all panel members review students' applications and assist BDP students in finding research opportunities and internships.

The impetus to create Connexus with its array of programs came from Provost Sheldon Ekland-Olson. In spring 2000, he and Vice Provost Lucia Gilbert assembled a cross-college group of faculty committed to rethinking undergraduate education. The Provost charged the committee to develop initiatives that would enhance the first year experience and integrate and define a student's education at UT Austin. Rather than create numerous new courses or add hours to a student's degree, the faculty conceived of the Connexus programs as roadmaps through UT's already rich curriculum, a means to help students construct meaningful intellectual narratives that would connect their studies across disciplines and across all four years of their undergraduate experience. The ideas for all three programs emerged from these discussions. Two Forum Seminars taught by members of this faculty group and the Vice Provost were piloted in fall 2000. The first BDP program, Technology and Society, was organized in spring 2001.

Overcoming Pitfalls and Hurdles

The Provost's leadership was key to the effort; his visible support was crucial in attracting faculty participation. Improving undergraduate education is a priority of President Faulkner as well. The participation of the University's top administrators helped to publicize the initiative and enlist the participation of a variety of units on campus.

Other steps that were important to the process included:
· Identifying priority areas that would interest faculty and encourage student buy-in (e.g., providing undergraduates in oversubscribed majors with additional options; connecting entering students to a range of possible areas of study; developing BDPs in areas of high interest to the campus).
· Articulating a vision early on and communicating that vision with a handsome logo, a brochure, a Web site, and presentations to university leadership groups and individual deans and department chairs.
· Being action-oriented and building in short-term accomplishments such as piloting Forum Seminars in the first year.
· Judiciously using faculty time so that every meeting marked an accomplishment.
· Building in modest incentives for faculty participation. Faculty who are instructors for Forum Seminars or who chair a faculty panel receive a modest research stipend. All Forum Seminars have Teaching Assistants. We also assist BDP faculty with grants in cross-disciplinary areas.
· Developing a strong staff infrastructure, including appointing a coordinator for the BDP Program, and linking that infrastructure to the faculty. A member of the Connexus faculty advisory board is a member of each BDP panel.

The difficulties for the future lie in sustaining the programs at a time of tight budgets. The program received two-year funding from one foundation and the administration is in the process of applying for additional funding.

For more information, contact Paige Schilt, Bridging Disciplines Program Coordinator, or Lucia Gilbert, Vice Provost, (paigelet@mail.utexas.edu; lucia@mail.utexas.edu) or see the Web site: http://www.utexas.edu/student/connexus/index.html.