Assembling your team

From Sense & Sensibility & Science
2023 Team Photo.jpg

In order to model interdisciplinary discussion, the course is best run with instructors from many different departments and fields. Some professors have a tendency to recruit the graduate students they know best as instructors, but it's worth trying to recruit from other elsewhere as well if possible. At UC Berkeley, the graduate student instructors are recruited from lots of departments! This makes it possible to demonstrate ideas and techniques from more areas than are represented by the professors alone. UC Berkeley also selects many of the best performing and most enthusiastic undergraduates from previous years to serve as teaching assistants.

When recruiting your team, it's essential to search for instructors that are interested in the interdisciplinary aspect of the course, have a collaborative attitude, and are excited by the interactive and hands-on component of the discussion section activities.

Some potential instructors can be intimidated by the amount of content in the course that is outside their discipline. In these cases it's worth reminding them that the course draws from lots of different fields and, by design, is no one's singular area of expertise. The documentation on this site should provide ample motivation, resources, and guidance no matter what field your instructors are from.

Note that this is not a course that "teaches itself." It has many moving parts that connect to each other and require careful execution to work properly. Make sure that your instructors are excited by the philosophy of the course and motivated to run it as smoothly and engagingly as they can.