Academic Board Course Approval & Management Procedures

University Breadth Subjects

Definition

University Breadth Subjects are interdisciplinary subjects taught collaboratively by different teaching departments and focusing on an issue or phenomenon of major significance that can be tellingly illuminated by bringing to bear different disciplinary perspectives. University Breadth Subjects are available as breadth in all bachelor degrees that require a breadth component.

Principles of University Breadth Subjects

While the breadth component of the New Generation undergraduate degrees has the general aim of introducing students to ways of knowing that are alternative to those developed in the core studies of their degree, the University Breadth Subjects (UBS) take this objective further, requiring students to engage with different ways of knowing not only across their course, but within the one subject and on a single topic.

The University Breadth Subjects encapsulate in a single subject the Melbourne Model’s vision of producing students with a broad and flexible intellectual range with which they can engage in understanding phenomena that are central to human individual and social experience. For this reason, they have gained a great deal of attention in discussions of the Melbourne Model both locally and internationally, and so it is important that there are clear guidelines that define what they are, their purpose and the requirements for their delivery.

The objectives of University Breadth subjects are that those undertaking them should:

If the University Breadth Subjects are made sufficiently attractive to students from all the degrees, the first objective of providing a communal space for interactive sharing of different disciplinary backgrounds will inevitably be achieved.

The second objective is an extension of the basic justification for breadth study, the additional element being that the different perspectives are focussed on a single topic. This leads almost necessarily to the requirement that the subject will address some significant issue climate change) or phenomenon (the human body), central enough to human life to ensure that it has been studied intensely from different perspectives.

The third and fourth purposes are in some ways the essence of the UBS experience for students: students are led to experience that truth and facts are constructed differently within different traditions of thought, and that the different frameworks are necessary to illuminate different aspects of the issue or phenomenon under study. This requires something of a balancing act. The University Breadth Subjects are variously described as ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘multidisciplinary’. The terms are often used interchangeably, but the first implies a coming together of the disciplines and a search for integration and common ground, whereas the latter implies that a greater separateness is maintained between the disciplines and that the issue/phenomenon being studied is refracted through different lenses to provide complementary rather than integrated understandings. A good UBS will undoubtedly work in both ways, although any subject may highlight integrated or complementary understandings more. (In the rest of this paper, the subjects will be loosely referred to, for convenience, as ‘interdisciplinary’ since that seems to be the more commonly used term, even though the Curriculum Commission Report actually used the term ‘multidisciplinary’. The use of ‘interdisciplinary’ here is not in any way intended to underplay the multidisciplinary possibilities.)

In defining interdisciplinary breadth, academic criteria will be paramount, but, given the realities of student load and consequent funding, administrative criteria will inevitably also come into play, not least to ensure that the interdisciplinary input is clearly established and maintained. Interdisciplinarity not only needs to be done, but needs to be seen to be done.

The Curriculum Commission recommended University Breadth Subjects (without quite naming them as such) in its Recommendation 10:

The Curriculum Commission recommends that the proposed Board of Undergraduate Studies endorse breadth subjects which involve multi-disciplinary approaches to foundational knowledge from across the humanities, social sciences and sciences as ‘University subjects’ to be available to students in all undergraduate degrees.

This might be interpreted to imply that in each UBS there should be representation from each of the humanities, social sciences and sciences, but the wording is loose and could be seen as simply requiring that the approach be multi-disciplinary and draw on appropriate fundamental knowledge that comes from across the range of disciplines, without strictly requiring representation from each large domain. Indeed, as experience has shown, the insistence on the former interpretation soon lands one in quite difficult dilemmas of interpreting disciplinary boundaries, so taking the looser interpretation, without losing the spirit of rigorous insistence on disciplinary difference, seems to the Working Group to be the wiser course.

It is fundamental to the notion of UBSs that each contributing discipline should be respected and given enough weight within the subject to establish itself, but that no discipline should be allowed to dominate. While acknowledging that it might be possible to have a subject that achieved the objectives of the University Breadth Subjects with only two disciplines represented, they are more likely to be achieved if there are more than two. A two-discipline subject would be in danger of presenting a dichotomised debate, whereas a subject incorporating three disciplines or more is more likely to encourage a rich interaction between discipline perspectives. The disciplines drawn on need to be centrally relevant to and illuminating of the topic. No discipline should be included simply to make up the required number, but each should have a distinctive and substantial contribution to make. Normally there will be contributions from each of the domains of the humanities, sciences and social sciences, and the judgment in these cases as to whether the subject should be designated a UBS is likely to be relatively straightforward. However, a more nuanced judgment will need to be made in other cases as to whether the disciplines represented are sufficiently distinct and diverse. In the end, this will need to be an academic decision, and so made by the Academic Programs Committee, after initial screening of the proposal by the Melbourne Model Committee. It is incumbent upon the group proposing a UBS to make the case that the disciplines represented do provide markedly different perspectives on the topic, all of which are important and illuminating.

In administrative terms, it is likely that the disciplines will come from different faculties and/or be majors in different NG degrees, and typically each discipline will be equally represented. The contribution of each must inform and be apparent in all aspects of curriculum development, teaching and assessment (i.e. it is not satisfactory, for example, for there to be lectures from various departments, but all the assessment is done by staff in the home department). Since it is vital that the team developing the subject interact within the planning, teaching and assessment as much as possible to ensure a coherent experience for students, as a rough measure no single department should be contributing more than 50% of the input to ensure the non-dominance of a single perspective. Indeed, in all but special cases, no faculty would be contributing more than 50% of the input, since, if they were, it is unlikely that the subject would be sufficiently “alien” from the undergraduate degree(s) that the faculty contributes to and so the subject could not be considered breadth for that degree (or those degrees). Given that each discipline perspective must be given a substantial enough presence to establish itself, no major contributing discipline should contribute less than approximately 20% to the teaching. (This does not mean that there might not be a single lecture from a discipline other than the three or more who contribute substantially, but none of the “three or more” should contribute less than 20%.)

Features of University Breadth Subjects

There are a thus a number of features of University Breadth Subjects that can be defined:

  1. They address an issue or phenomenon of major significance, that can be tellingly illuminated by bringing to bear different disciplinary perspectives;
  2. They incorporate and integrate three or more disciplinary perspectives that are
    a. clearly distinct;
    b. centrally relevant; and
    c. each given importance without allowing any one to dominate;
  3. Normally there will be representation from each of the domains of the sciences, social sciences and the humanities;
  4. The incorporation of different disciplines should be apparent in all aspects of curriculum, teaching and assessment;
  5. In administrative terms, to ensure the establishment, obviousness and maintenance of disciplinary diversity, normally:
    a. no School, Department or Faculty will have input greater than 50% to the subject;
    b. each of the Schools/Departments/Faculties making a substantial contribution will have input of at least 20% to the subject.

Proposals

In proposing a University Breadth Subject, the development team will need to state:

  1. why an interdisciplinary perspective is valuable or necessary on this topic;
  2. what disciplines will be integrated in the curriculum development, teaching and assessment and in approximately what percentages;
  3. how each of the disciplines presents a distinctly different perspective on the topic, representing a different ‘way of knowing’;
  4. how the contribution of the different disciplines will be brought together coherently in the curriculum and teaching; and
  5. how the assessment will ensure coverage and/or integration of the different disciplinary perspectives.

Approval Process

University breadth subjects require the approval of the Academic Board and the approval of program directors of the new generation undergraduate degrees.

The academic approval process is outlined below.

  1. Submit the University breadth subject proposal to the Academic Secretary.
  2. The committee secretary checks the proposal for completeness and then forwards the proposal to an academic shepherd (a member of the Academic Programs Committee (APC) or Research Higher Degrees Committee (RHDC) with responsibility for one or more faculties).
  3. The shepherd considers the proposal and makes a recommendation to the APC. (The shepherd may consult with the faculty/graduate school before making a recommendation.)
  4. The APC considers the proposal and makes a recommendation to the Academic Board.
  5. The Academic Board is responsible for approving all University breadth subjects.
  6. Once the proposal has been approved, the faculty/graduate school proposing the UBS is notified and the approved form is forwarded to the Student System for implementation.

Timeline for Approval

University breadth subjects for implementation in the following year must be endorsed at the June meetings of the Academic Programs Committee in order to enable implementation in the Student System for publication in the Handbook by the end of October. UBS proposals submitted after the submission deadline as stated in the timelines may not be able to be implemented in time to be offered the following year.

Forms

 

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