Saturday, February 13, 2010
Interdisciplinary vs. Multidisciplinary
So I've been thinking a lot about this weeks question because it's hard to pinpoint multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary on this organization. I came to the conclusion that it operates as both. There is a common goal among the staff and that is to end educational inequity. However, their are multiple departments that work towards this goal such as the Program team that oversees the corps members (teachers) and lends support to the schools when needed. There's the Operations team who's responsible for administrative and financial tasks; maintaing budgets and hiring and training new staff. The Development team deals directly with the donors, all marketing materials and writing grants. The District Strategy team places teachers in schools, creates and maintains relationships within the educational and political community. Finally there's the Alumni Affairs team that works to fully engage previous corps members within their communities. They do this by encouraging and supporting the corps members to enter fields of leadership in schools and politics. So all these departments have their own responsibilities but it is for one common goal. Now there's also CFAT, which stands for Cross-Functional Affairs Team. This team is interdisciplinary because it consists of staff from all the previously mentioned teams. The individuals on this team bring their own perspective from their department into the meetings that take place twice a month. During these meetings staff will focus on "in-depth skill building in the competencies as well as ongoing analysis of each member’s mindset, work values, and time applications". I asked my mentor, Wendy, why she thought CFAT was needed and she said, because of the quick growth of the organization in our region over the past 3-4 years there is a greater need for teams to be able to better coordinate their efforts. As far as the organizational structure I believe it to be hierarchical because each department does have a manager and the organization does have an Executive Director, so it is a pyramid stucture.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
From reading your post I can see how the organization would operate in both a multi and interdisciplinary way. The CFAT team is definitely interdisciplinary, the term cross-functional even suggests it!
ReplyDelete