Abstract:

Collaboration and problem solving are two important skills all students should develop in the 21st century. In this paper, the author and her collaborator will discuss a collaborative, problem-based multidisciplinary teaching and learning model. This model was developed by the administrators and educators from a midwestern University and a culturally and ethnically diverse public school district to decrease the dropout rate among the high school students. 85 percent of the student population of this school district came from economically disadvantaged households. Among these, 88 percent students were of color, of which 50 percent were Latino and 38 percent English Learners. (Kansas Can Report, 2016-17). To assist the high school students in envisioning a better future for themselves, the collaborators developed a mentoring model wherein the University students mentored the high school students, helping them to understand the importance of higher education and the different career paths available to them. More than 30 graduate students from Interior Architecture and Industrial Design and over 100 high school students from the school district participated in this program.

This partnership offered multiple opportunities for students from very different backgrounds to collaborate to solve a design problem. While collaborating, the graduate and high students helped each other in honing their communication, collaboration, listening, and design thinking skills. The high school students realized that regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicity, gender, language, and even citizenship status, they can achieve their career goals if they pursue higher education. It can help them in achieving their desire to be gainfully employed in this new skill-based global marketplace. The graduate students were exposed to the diverse students of a public school district and gained knowledge of project management, how to communicate, conduct, and document client meetings, and how to develop creative design solutions with the stakeholders.

In this paper, the authors will share the project goals, this collaborative educational project and mentoring model details, the challenges faced while developing and executing this collaborative project, how diverse pedagogies were utilized for successful execution of this model, and the project outcomes. The examples of graduate students’ design of the high school renovation, and the career and technical high school students’ work will demonstrate how this mentoring model worked. The high school students made conceptual models for informal learning, which helped graduate design students in envisioning and designing the renovation of the high school. Thus, the graduate students utilized learning by doing approach, to demonstrate how design thinking can be applied to solve a problem. Through this paper, the authors would like to share this mentoring model, so that other administrators and educators can partner and develop a mutually beneficial teaching, learning, and mentoring model of their own to assist their students.

Keywords:

Collaborative Learning, Problem Based Learning, Multidisciplinary Teaching and Learning, Mentoring, Diversity, 21st Century Skills, Collaboration.