TCNJ

7 Prairie FALL 2021 that they would have a hard time figuring out what they can do together," says Pulimood. The program, known as Collaborating Across Boundaries, might be traced to 1990, when Pearson arrived at TCNJ to teach journalism after a career that included a seven-year stretch at Bell Labs, widely considered a model of idea cross-pollination. "I immediately started running my classes as if they were virtual busi- nesses, and looking for collaborators outside of my department," she says. Pearson's first collaborative effort brought together students of communications, art, and engineering to create "a very fancy lamp," as well as plans for producing and marketing it. In the end, "there were some manufacturing glitches, and there was a quality-control problem," she says, but even those "mimicked what would happen in the real world." CAB formally began taking shape around 2009, when Pearson invited Pulimood and her students to work on a National Science Foundation–funded writing and computing project with Fisher Middle School in Ewing Township. Partnering with an off-campus or- ganization to advance solutions to social issues created a template that helps define the program. Thanks to NSF funding, CAB is expected to have 13 collaborations running simultaneously this year, says Pulimood. Recent pairings have had students helping Habitat for Humanity In fall 2020, Maya Hendl '23 found herself in an unfamiliar situation: in a class that required criminology students like herself to collaborate on a project with computer science students. Their task: create a website for a commu- nity partner, the Greater Trenton Chapter of the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow, that would make local data about issues such as bail reform and felon disenfranchisement more widely accessible. But Hendl, who majors in both criminology and women, gender, and sexuality studies, says things got off to a slow start, and not because the students were forced by the pandemic to meet online. More awkwardly, the two sets of students sometimes simply could not understand each other. At one point, a student from the computer science side told her, "Whenever you guys tell us about criminology stuff, it's like you're speaking a different language," Hendl says. "And I said, 'That's exactly how I feel when you guys talk about coding.'" Spanning that disconnect, however, was pretty much why the two groups had been thrown together in the first place — and they had computer science professor Monisha Pulimood and journalism professor Kim Pearson to thank. When the two instructors began intermingling students from disparate learning tracks more than a decade ago, "one of our goals was to pair students from disciplines that are so different Better together Two professors with different backgrounds set the standard for real-world collaborative education. "One of our goals was to pair students from disciplines that are so different that they would have a hard time figuring out what they can do together," says Pulimood.

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