Abstract

This project creates cross-disciplinary teaching networks at each of the four partner institutions, extending a successful pilot project at the University of Tasmania. These cohesive and active networks will develop distributed leadership within and between institutions through the collaborative design and delivery of student-led interdisciplinary learning activities around climate change. Institutional capacity for distributed leadership in cross-disciplinary teaching about climate change will be built by creating tight-knit collegial hubs or peer networks that respond to complex issues transcending traditional curricular boundaries. Applicable to a wide variety of pressing real world problems, this approach builds leadership in two ways. Network members develop individual leadership capacities through collaborative processes including peer mentoring, interdisciplinary roundtable discussions, and team-based curriculum development and teaching delivery. Network members also participate in collective forms of leadership that build trust and reciprocity across disciplinary boundaries, produce group interactions exceeding the sum of individual contributions, and further embed distributed leadership development as ‘business as usual’.