Via Gerald Graff in Inside Higher Ed: Should university teachers be aware of each other’s courses?

Excerpt only, the whole article is worth reading:

“I believe that our experience of teaching in hermetically sealed classrooms makes us — to coin a word — “courseocentric.” Courseocentrism — like its ethno-, ego-, and Euro- counterparts — is a kind of tunnel vision in which our little part of the world becomes the whole. We get so used to the restricted confines of our own courses that we became oblivious to the fact — or simply uninterested in it — that students are enrolled in other courses whose teachers at any moment may be undercutting our most cherished beliefs. As my retired colleague Larry Poston recently observed, there is something remarkable about the “almost entire lack of interest we manifest as a profession in what is going on in our colleagues’ classes.”

To get on the same page, of course, we would need to know something about each other’s teaching and the ways of thinking behind it, and such knowledge might lead to embarrassing disagreements. So perhaps the less we know about each other the better. It’s not surprising, then, that instead of asking us to try to get on the same page in our teaching, universities assume that each of us will figure out how to teach our subjects on our own.

This assumption is understandable, since many of us became academics in the first place because we liked figuring things out on our own and were good at it. I myself certainly appreciate my classroom freedom, and am not about to ask that I be made to submit a lesson plan to my department head, a curriculum committee, or a district supervisor, as many high school teachers must do. I think I understand why untenured and adjunct faculty members may feel that the classroom is a relatively safe zone that would be threatened if their colleagues knew more about their teaching. I know that on my own really bad days as a teacher I’m relieved that the train wreck has been witnessed only by my students and not my senior colleagues and deans.

Still, I can’t help wondering if our professionalism and our prestige would be fatally compromised if we had to coordinate our teaching the way high school faculties often do. I also suspect that we overestimate the safety our classroom privacy confers, and that more transparency and collaboration in our teaching would not only help students make better sense of us, but would ultimately be as safe for the most vulnerable among us as a curriculum that lets us hide out from each other.

The learning community model is one obvious way to go, but an excellent first step would be to pair first year composition and general education courses, as many colleges and universities now do. A step beyond that would be to pair some science and humanities courses and courses in ancient and modern periods. If we don’t make such pairings, students will lose sight of the contrasts and continuities that define the sciences and humanities and differentiate the ancient from the modern. We’re also missing an opportunity every time a big period course isn’t co-taught by colleagues from several different disciplines. Then, too, the more we are part of a team, the less easily replaceable we become — a fact that could provide more job security to adjunct faculty members.

The trouble with leaving it up to each of us to figure things out on our own is that it really means leaving it up to our students to figure us out on their own.”