By: Alankrita Pandey (Associate Professor in the College of Business) and Jillian Graves (Associate Professor in the College of Health and Human Services)

“Coordination, communication, collaboration” have always been the cornerstones of problem-solving in our disciplines of Social Work and Business Management. In Management we consider the need to work on optimizing solutions with imperfect information while balancing and meeting various stakeholder expectations. In Social Work, while focus is on the individual’s mental wellness, there is a strong need to bring together a variety of resources to work towards providing them with positive solutions. As educators in these areas, we have deliberated the importance of connecting across differences, but only theoretically in our classrooms.

It took the pandemic, and working together on the EMU-AAUP Executive Council, for us to start discovering commonalities in our research and pedagogy. Coffee and a shared love of cats only helped cement our partnership. We started working together on research on workplace stress for frontline non-healthcare workers, melding perspectives on workplace outcomes and employee mental health. As we worked together, we found ourselves deeply involved in the severity and complexity of the problems that Covid-19 was creating for workplaces and employees. We had to find ways to bring our academic learnings into the classroom. At the same time, it was becoming clearer that mere conceptual discussions would not be sufficient.

And this is where we introduced the InterProfessional Education (IPE) Simulation. Used in Healthcare to bring together different healthcare relevant professional groups and students in a classroom setting to improve collaboration and quality of care, IPE has been developed to reduce the impact of professional silos in training healthcare students.

We used the IPE model and developed an in-class simulation to use with upper-level graduate students from Management and Social Work. Since these students had taken lower level graduate classes, they knew about the importance of working collaboratively across disciplines. However, they had varying levels of practical experience. We divided the class into groups consisting of equal numbers of students from each discipline. Each group was presented with the simulated case of a workplace struck hard by Covid-19 and asked to find employee and workplace solutions. They were to approach the particular employee morale, workplace outcome, mental health, and physical sickness issues using the discipline-specific training they had received thus far. As with other IPE simulations, we let the students manage and handle the problem and discussions. Then they got together and discussed the process they had participated in.

The student response to the simulation was more than gratifying. We had been observing their interactions and were impressed by the depth, nuance, and understanding with which they approached the problem at hand. Their reactions to working together were even more positive. Social Work students remarked on how they were now able to view individual issues with a lens of bottom-line outcomes, while Management students talked about how it helped them move away from only a cost-centric perspective to finding people-specific solutions.

Both groups expressed how much more their understanding of their own fields was enriched by this interaction. They talked about how they rarely interacted with students from other colleges and how little they understood about those fields. Even students who had work experience were amazed at how much more they learned about an issue just by interacting with someone trained differently from them. They remained engaged in the discussion way beyond class time (and this was a late weekday evening).

As colleagues and inter-disciplinary researchers, this has been an extremely rewarding experience. Our research has helped us bring together our training in distinctly different fields with a common purpose. We enjoy the academic rigor and challenge that it presents, along with the complementary skills we bring together. Being able to translate the varied and sometimes disparate perspectives of our academic fields to active learning in the classroom has been incredible. Our pandemic training in Zoom technology has helped us seamlessly align this process to a classroom setting. The case itself was not difficult to develop. We know that even after the pandemic, there will be other broad change related workplace issues requiring complex interactions, communication and coordination. By using the IPE we are able to provide our students with a controlled environment in which to develop and practice their skills.

We want to continue working on developing this Interprofessional Interdisciplinary approach as a part of our pedagogy using a broader array of cases and simulations. We would like to reach out to the campus community to work with us on more such curricular and research collaborations. In fact, we would like to work to create a Learning Community of interested interdisciplinary scholars and teachers. Please keep your eyes open for opportunities to be part of such work in the future.