Chapter 5: Collaborative Interdisciplinary Team Teaching: A Model for Good Practice

Miyazaki International College (MIC), in Kyushu, Japan, offers a distinctive educational programme that attracts faculty members from many countries. Using English as its primary medium of instruction, the college implements an unusual team teaching approach. The faculty body of MIC is broadly composed of two large subgroups of roughly equal proportions. One subgroup comprises English language teaching faculty, whereas the other comprises faculty from a variety of different academic disciplines representing the contents of a typical liberal arts curriculum. Individuals from each subgroup are paired together in sustained collaborative teaching partnerships. Dubbed “collaborative interdisciplinary team teaching” (CITT), this instructional practice was originally derived from adjunct models of team teaching (Stewart, Sagliano, & Sagliano, 2002) and principles of content-based language instruction (CBLI) for second language learners (Brinton, Snow, & Mesche, 1989; Sagliano & Greenfield, 1998).