“If everyone is thinking the same, then someone isn’t thinking.” That line is frequently attributed to U.S. Army Gen. George Patton, thought to have been spoken in one of his many motivational speeches to soldiers in 1944. In the ensuing eight decades, it has become shorthand for leaders in nearly every industry.

One way to avoid following a single point of view to its inevitable conclusion is to change who is in the discussion. The terms interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-disciplinary teams have become ubiquitous in academic settings in the last 30 years, but TU has made this type of cross-collaboration part of its mission.

So much so, the university designed and built an entire campus facility around the idea: the Health Professions Building, a state-of-the-art structure that creates opportunities for students to engage in teamwork and develop the communication skills essential for success in the integrated health care teams they’ll find in the real world.

Interdisciplinary collaboration occurs across campus every day. TU’s collective of special interest groups (SIGs) is one way that happens. Housed administratively within the Fisher College of Science and Mathematics and the School of Emerging Technologies, SIGs are designed to promote information exchange, resource sharing and collaboration among faculty, staff and students from different departments, colleges and administrative branches.

Past SIGs have examined ideas and technologies including accessibility, Big Data analysis techniques and geospatial information systems (GIS) and environmental informatics as it pertains to environmental science.

A look at four of the collaborations shows that the range and dynamism of their predecessors live on.

Design Thinking

Liyan Song, a professor in TU’s Department of Learning Technologies, Design and School Library Media was part of the initial cohort of the Design Thinking SIG in fall 2022.

Our SIG members include faculty from the disciplines of anthropology, educational technology, instructional design, machine learning and software engineering.

Liyan Song

Design thinking research and practice has gained much attention in the past decade or so in a variety of learning contexts, particularly in the STEAM fields. It is a human-centered approach to problem-solving that leans on collaboration between diverse teams to develop user-focused products, services and strategies. TU’s Design Thinking SIG would like to promote this perspective through its collaborative research, practices and networking endeavors.

“Our SIG members include faculty from the disciplines of anthropology, educational technology, instructional design, machine learning and software engineering,” Song says. “We see the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration on promoting the integration of design thinking in teaching and the application of design thinking in interdisciplinary research.”

Members of the SIG have engaged in a collaborative self-study and iteratively developed four design thinking cases in education, anthropology, software engineering and machine learning. The results of their research have been published as a book chapter. Song and her colleagues are actively seeking funding opportunities to support the creation of a design thinking curriculum for TU students.

Not all their work is theoretical. The SIG members have been exploring ways to integrate design thinking in their teaching practices when appropriate to provide richer opportunities for TU students.

Digital Humanities

Conversations in fall 2024 came to fruition in spring 2025 when associate history professor Vicky McAlister, performing arts librarian Christina Gibson and digital archivist Jasmine Malone began to collaborate on promoting and supporting the digital humanities classes, programs and interests across campus.

This group explores digital tools and methods to enhance teaching or research in disciplines concerned with the experience of being human. It also distributes information about publication/presentation opportunities, provides opportunities to request Cook Library investment in digital-humanities-related resources and brainstorms ways to develop a digital humanities major for TU students. 

“I‘m the only faculty member with a specific job role in digital humanities, and what I realized was how many people across campus in the different colleges do something that can tap into the digital humanities,” McAlister says. “My motivation was to de-silo the university and faculty teaching and research interests.”

One thing about trying to break down silos is that someone or some group of people have to lead it.

Jasmine Malone

The SIG has started holding workshops in various aspects of digital humanities, including a September seminar in using ArcGIS technology—a platform for users to manage, visualize and share information using GIS software—to enhance storytelling. McAlister already uses it in her classes and brought volunteer students to the group’s second meeting to show off their work for faculty to see how they may incorporate the tool in their pedagogy.

“One thing about trying to break down silos is that someone or some group of people have to lead it,” Malone says. “This is a unique group in the way that we are already doing work across the different colleges and the different departments, where we have a mindset of being able to find those opportunities to bring people together in ways that they might not think about.”

Malone, Gibson and their library colleagues have an overarching view on digital humanities work on campus. The library staff has helped students put together oral histories and StoryMaps for the Unearthing Towson’s History project, and their existing and expanding digital collection is available for coursework or research.

The focus on collaborative work, on working across disciplines in a way that’s productive and that recognizes different people‘s labor...

Christina Gibson

Malone is also planning ways to use digital visualization tools to display materials that exist within the university archives in interesting ways.

“The focus on collaborative work, on working across disciplines in a way that‘s productive and that recognizes different people‘s labor and seeks to value that…those are not principles that you see celebrated in the humanities all the time,” Gibson says. “Digital humanists would define a lot of what people are doing here as digital humanities, even if they themselves would not define it that way. So expanding the umbrella and allowing people to identify with this way of thinking is important to us.”

Imagining America

This group supports all faculty and staff interested in interdisciplinary collaboration and creatively reimagining their teaching, practice and scholarship in partnership with Imagining America (IA), a consortium that brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists and organizers to imagine, study and enact a more just and liberatory America and world. TU’s chapter is a collaboration between BTU, the Faculty Academic Center of Excellence at Towson (FACET), the Office of Civic Engagement and Social Responsibility (CESR) and the School of Emerging Technologies. 

Prior to the COVID pandemic, TU had been an institutional member of IA, and two years ago, Romy Hübler and Morna McNulty paired up to reinstate the university’s membership. Hübler, CESR director, and McNulty, professor of elementary education, are co-chairs, bringing administrative and academic acumen to their leadership.

“It all goes back to the mission of [CESR]. We want to make sure that people feel they matter, they‘re valued for who they are, for their stories and experiences,” Hübler says. “The other piece is to think about the approaches we‘re using in our programs or classes that get in the way of us feeling that connection. We‘re trained to just go, go, go, so it can be hard to pause and build those connections so that we can harness people‘s imagination and have them see a space for themselves.”

The team aims to create a space where faculty and staff can come together and think about their practices, research, teaching, and where there is room for imagination and creativity.

We want to make sure that people feel they matter, they’re valued for who they are, for the stories and experiences.

Romy Hübler

“The arts and creativity have everything to do with having a full toolbox to create the communities that we want to see,” McNulty says, “and to embrace the sustainable practices that we know are important for democracy to not only survive but thrive.”

Last academic year, the group held a series of workshops on campus where participants from multiple TU colleges as well as student affairs organizations, such as the Career, Military and Veterans and Counseling centers among others, completed creative arts or creative community building exercises using the Imagining America workbook.

“We asked participants questions like, ‘What does it mean to thrive in higher education today? What might that look like? How do you imagine things as they ought to be?’” says McNulty. “We hope folks walk away with connections in the community they can build on and hope for the future.”

While the co-chairs acknowledge the obstacles to such work, McNulty reports the participants came out of the workshops feeling positive and excited in ways they hadn’t been before. Buoyed by these early successes, Hübler and McNulty are in the planning phase of widening membership to include colleagues and supporters at UMBC and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

The three universities together received an IA grant to enhance collaboration between them, and they created the B'More with Imagination Collaboratory to gather participants from all three campuses to share resources, continue workshopping and develop their ideas. As a result of this collaboration, Hübler has been chosen for a three-year term on the Imagining America advisory board.

“Engaging with the imagination and democratic practices matters to everybody,” McNulty says. “We have an opportunity to cross-pollinate our expertise, our interests, our knowledge, the things that we find are challenges, those things transcend our respective subject areas. It‘s important, especially for those who don‘t think that using the imagination is a logical fit for their respective fields of work, to see that their experiences also matter in the broader picture.”

Sustainability

Associate geography professor Michael Allen and Feng Cheng, an assistant professor in the Department of Business Analytics and Technology Management, are the new chairs of the group, which is focused on creating interdisciplinary connections to support the growth of sustainability-related content within the curriculum and research. They have continued the monthly meetings and interdisciplinary conversations around sustainability.

Cheng cites an example from their October meeting to illustrate this point. “We have a faculty member from the English department. And she developed a course on sustainability. Well, you may not learn this information until you have this meeting. Immediately, we had a huge chat on Zoom where people asked, ‘Is it possible that you can share your syllabus with us?’ and ‘I want to do something similar, and I do want to discuss this with you.’”

The group also maintains a Sharepoint site to upload resources and share information that has proven very popular, and Cheng and Allen would like to continue the speaking series begun by prior leadership. What they are primarily focusing on now is the university’s Sustainability and Climate Action Plan (SCAP), which aligns with the university’s new master plan.

A SIG is an opportunity to get people together and imagine new possibilities by bouncing ideas off each other because everybody is smart in their own way. When you put two people who are smart in different ways together then possibilities expand in an exponential way. And then everyone benefits.

Christina Gibson

“That’s never been done here before, so some of the work that we‘ve taken on this semester is to promote opportunities for students, faculty and staff to engage in discussions arising from the plan,” Allen says. “We are also thinking about the curriculum: what are the barriers to integrating sustainability into classes and where are we already succeeding?”

Cheng and Allen were each drawn to this group because of the community aspect. And the different voices and perspectives with the membership have been part of what makes it solid.

“Sustainability crosses disciplines, sectors, geographies,” Allen says. “I ask the question often, ‘Sustainability for whom?’ You get very different answers based upon your audience. Those different disciplines have different lenses at which they interpret those words. But if we‘re moving toward a more sustainable campus, community, nation, world, I think those discussions provide value.”

TU’s focus on interdisciplinary education, research and collaboration benefits every member of the university community. It helps break down siloes between departments and divisions and makes works produced by faculty and staff more powerful. For students, even in specialized majors, interdisciplinary teams and attitudes guide them to a deeper understanding of how their majors related to other disciplines, better application of their knowledge in different contexts and more effective communication with people outside their fields. Well-rounded graduates are highly sought after in the job market as well because their ability to transfer their skills enables them to easily join professional communities.

The creation of the United States’ motto, E pluribus unum (out of many, one), may have been the country’s first call for interdisciplinary collaboration, and TU’s faculty and staff understand the assignment.

Every person spoken to for this article said something similar: Divergence leads to community.

“A SIG is an opportunity to get people in a room together and then imagine new possibilities by bouncing ideas off each other because everybody is smart in their own way,” Christina Gibson says. “When you put two people who are smart in different ways together then possibilities expand in an exponential way. And then everyone benefits.”