ESSE & CRESS Colloquium: The Cross-Campus Capstone Classroom (C4) – a journey into multidisciplinary teaching and learning

Over the past five years, York has had a new experimental classroom space to bring undergraduate students and faculty together from across all its faculties, to tackle community challenges in a cross-disciplinary and sustainable way. The cross-campus capstone classroom started through a meeting between its founders at the teaching commons, where they connected over the transformative potential for capstone courses. From a first cohort of 70 students in 2019, the program is now expecting between 450 and 500 students in 2024-5, across three different C4 courses: a 3-credit C4 Launchpad aimed at 2nd/3rd year students, a 6-credit C4 Odyssey aimed at 4th year students and a 3-credit C4 Management aimed at graduating and graduate students. C4 has won two major national/international teaching awards and has been awarded over $1M in external grants since its creation. This colloquium will present the first five years of C4, some of the key lessons learned over that period for cross-campus collaborations, and the future possibilities being explored as C4 continues to innovate for the York community.

About the speakers:

Franz Newland is an Associate Professor – Teaching in the Department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering, Danielle Robinson is an Associate Professor in Dance in the Faculty of Arts, Media, Performance and Design and Andrea Robinson is a Senior Contract Faculty member in the department of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, all at York University, Toronto, Canada. Danielle and Franz created C4 in 2019, and Danielle has worked as Director of C4 and Franz as Co-director since 2020. Andrea has taken on the leadership of the classroom delivery of C4 since joining the C4 teaching team in 2020.