The Interstitial Curriculum

It occurred to me recently that we in higher education talk about the curriculum and the co-curriculum, and there are departments and offices and structures involved in making those parallel structures work (hopefully) to the benefit of our students. But there’s another curriculum at play as well — a curriculum that is every bit as fundamental to our institutional learning outcomes as the formal curriculum but that isn’t “owned” by any department and isn’t administered in any systematic way across the institution. I’ve started thinking of this as the “interstitial curriculum.”

The interstitial curriculum is where students learn the intellectual habits and skills that cut across curricular and co-curricular lines. It doesn’t have a home in the formal curriculum, and it can’t happen exclusively in the co-curriculum, either. Instead, it lives in the multiple and cumulative experiences that individual students have as they live out their college experiences through, among, and between the intertwinings of the curriculum and the co-curriculum. Depending on the institution, these are probably things like writing (never something that any single department can teach fully), metacognition, project management, time management, interpersonal “soft” skills, and yes, information literacy.

These are things that might even be named in mission statements or in institutional and departmental learning objectives, or that tons of faculty say are critical … but there’s often no course or formal home for them in the institutional structures that ensure other learning objectives. Everyone relies on students building these intellectual muscles by working with someone else somewhere else in the institution. They may not be sure who or where or when this work happens or should happen, but they really hope that does happen because otherwise their own goals for students in their courses or majors can’t happen, or can’t happen well.

In my own work, I live in the tension between the deeply rewarding, mission-critical work that I get to do with students every day, and the dismissal of some who assume that the work I want to do with their students has surely already been done by someone else at some other time — probably in their first year seminar. I live in a liminal space, where literally dozens of departments on campus list learning outcomes directly related to information literacy, the campus mission and learning goals invoke information literacy, and yet no department has a formal plan to ensure that their students get intentional, scaffolded practice with the intellectual habits of information literacy. And I’m not saying that this is a bad place to be! There are many good reasons at play in this state of affairs. But it does mean that my entire existence feels similar to the work of the fascia in the human body: necessary, often invisible, existing between the better-known structures of the body, not well understood, but instrumental in encouraging and even allowing the intellectual work of the disciplines. I live in the spaces between.

It’s a very, very interesting space to inhabit. Not easy, but interesting.