03-05-2025
At its most basic, interdisciplinary education refers to that which relates to more than one branch of knowledge. It’s a concept that has intrigued me, and made me wonder what could be possible with interdisciplinary education. What could it look like inside the Daniels School of Business?
Cornerstone for Business is an intriguing approach to interdisciplinary education, as our students take communications courses from tenure-track faculty inside Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts. It’s a ground-breaking opportunity for students to engage with foundational thinkers at the earliest stages of their education. But could we do something special inside the Daniels School with our interdisciplinary faculty?
That question is one that three of us tackled last spring when we taught an undergraduate class, Solving Health Care Challenges, at Purdue’s John Martinson Honors College (JMHC) on how to improve health care in Indiana. While Indiana excels on many measures, health care is traditionally not one of those, so Jillian Carr, associate professor in economics, Kate Zipay, assistant professor in organizational behavior and human resources, and I designed a team-taught course to intentionally weave interdisciplinary functions throughout its 16 weeks. Each of us selected two tools from our discipline to teach students ways to explore various problems and provide fixes for health care issues that impact Indiana, including creating a maternal health app, generating solutions for inner-city food deserts, and attacking gateways for opioid addiction. The students then worked in teams to consider how practical business solutions could be brought to those challenges.
This course was also designed to bring in outside experts and voices to students. Often in our usual courses, it can be challenging to find time and space to work with those in fields to include industry professionals. This semester, we designed the course to welcome expert voices from private foundations, industry partners such as Cook Group and Eli Lilly, as well as the non-profit and patient perspectives. Students were exposed to a multitude of stakeholders that are engaged in the work, and this made the course more impactful.
Because the course was piloted at the JMHC, the students came from the Daniels School and a combination of science and engineering programs. That allowed our teaching team to create interdisciplinary student teams for selecting proposed topics and solutions to presenting on various health care challenges and solutions in Indiana. Student feedback was great, and I look forward to co-creating more interdisciplinary courses inside the business school to bring this approach and experience to more of our students.
Cara Putman is a clinical associate professor in business law and ethics at Purdue’s Daniels School of Business. She serves as the director of the Brock-Wilson Center for Women in Business and the course coordinator for two courses, Legal Foundations of Business and Foundations of Ethics. She also has served as the assistant area head for Law, Communications, and Ethics since 2021. Professor Putman is an award-winning member of the faculty and Teaching Academy and an accomplished author of more than 40 novels. She is frequently asked to speak on topics including leadership, building culture, wellbeing, and others related to student development and confidence.
