Abstract
Globalization has penetrated Higher Education leading to cross-cultural and international cooperation both among professors and between student groups. Furthermore, the emerging social recognition of an actual need for interdisciplinary / transdisciplinary problem solving has led to increasing collaboration across disciplines in Higher Education. Collaborative teaching of two or more instructors with different disciplinary backgrounds enhances the possibility of interdisciplinary thinking and research. There is an increasing literature on learning collaboratively, focusing on teaching methods that enhance collaboration among students. However, collaborative teaching in Higher Education needs to be further explored.
Collaborative teaching is a new challenge in Higher Education, which is characterized by distinct disciplines and individual researchers and instructors. Co-teaching teaches by example the way to work together for the same goal and towards collaborative societies in an increasingly individualistic world and academia. In this paper, we reflect on some of our experiences in collaborative teaching at the Higher Education level in Greece, and especially in Environmental Studies courses. We will use personal reflections of the instructors - on the basis of a qualitative questionnaire, as well as students' evaluations as sources of information, with the aim to explore challenges and benefits of co-teaching efforts on the one hand in the design, instruction and assessment and on the other, at the administrative level. We will also discuss a strategic framework for the promotion of effective collaborative teaching.