Katherine Legge

Sustaining interdisciplinary education: developing boundary crossing governance

ABSTRACT Interdisciplinarity has become part of contemporary university discourses on knowledge in both research and curriculum. The move to break down traditional disciplinary boundaries reflects emerging forms of enquiry into knowledge that are less hegemonic and more distributed, and more tuned to its production, practices and the needs of its practitioners. A focus on complex problems that draws on multiple knowledge domains and an emphasis on professional knowledge have engendered a loosening of discipline boundaries in the development of curriculum and degree programmes. In this case study, we investigated teaching practices across discipline boundaries: how interdisciplinary curriculum and teaching are understood, practiced and supported within an Australian university that typifies a discipline-based organisational structure. Through interviews with relevant academics, managers and professionals, we explored the challenges and strategies in sustaining interdisciplinary curricula that were managed between several disciplinary Schools. Our findings were two-fold: engagement with interdisciplinary knowledge had profound effects on academic culture and identities among participating students and teaching staff; and significant challenges arose in the coordination and administration of interdisciplinary education, with institutional structures highlighted as a contributing factor. While the literature on interdisciplinary education emphasises academic collaborations and leadership, there has been less attention to the role of institutional processes – mediated by procedures, artefacts and routines – in supporting and sustaining interdisciplinary education. Aspects of the case study are used to analyse the conflicting practices arising with interdisciplinary education, and to develop the potential for boundary crossing modes of interdisciplinary governance to counter the legacy of discipline-based structures.

Employing numerical techniques in the analysis and design of musical instruments

In the simplest of terms, a musical instrument consists of a source of oscillation coupled to a resonating body. The exception to this is an idiophone such as a triangle or gong, where the vibrating source is able to be its own radiator of sound. Whatever the configuration, the radiating structure is generally not a simple shape easily represented by a mathematical formulation, and analytical solutions to the governing equations of even a simplified model are often not obtainable. Working with Neville Fletcher in the 1980’s a personal computer was employed to undertake a time-stepping routine through the equations of a simplified model of a kinked metal bar, to depict nonlinear coupling of its modes of vibration. Similar analysis of a gong modelled by a spherical shell with a kinked edge was well beyond the available computing power. In this paper we illustrate how the development of computers and numerical techniques over the intervening thirty years means that we are now able to describe and analyse com...

TEQUILA—The use of a structured pre-lecture programme in physics for first-year applied science students

Many students find the transition from secondary to tertiary education difficult. White et al. (1) have considered some of the difficulties encountered by Australian students that include the change from a small personal secondary school to a large impersonal university, as well as the shift in responsibility for learning from teacher to student. The teaching strategy outlined in this paper was designed to address the latter issue by encouraging new university students to take more responsibility for their own learning. The students considered in the study were enrolled in Physics 110, a one semester non-calculus unit that is part of the Applied Science degree at La Trobe University, Bendigo, and covers a basic introduction to mechanics, SHM and wave motion, fluids and heat. The authors were the teacher/researchers for the subject, presenting both the classroom and laboratory sections to 32 students in 1995 and 14 students in 1996. All students enrolled in Physics 110 had completed Year 12 Physics (or equ...