Intrinsic Motivation and Pervasive Interdisciplinarity in the Higher Education

In the recent past, expert professors lectured about well established knowledge to obedient students who were expected to master the things they were told. This worked well in a workplace that demanded obedience and solutions using extant knowledge and methods. Today, we need curious, courageous students who can strike out on their own, learn what to learn, how to learn, and to so for their own reasons across disciplines. Join host Dave Goldberg as he interviews Rob Martello (Olin College), and Jon Stolk (SMU) two masters of bringing interdisciplinarity, intrinsic motivation, mindset, and self-determination theory to the classroom. For a number of years Rob, a historian, and Jon, a material scientist, team taught a course together called “The Stuff of History” in which the history of the American Revolution and Paul Revere were juxtaposed with the material science and metallurgy of the early republic. Join Rob, Jon, and Dave for a boundary pushing conversation.