The Classroom
Your professors don't bring slides. They bring questions.
You build the answer.
Three ASU schools co-teach every class. Each 2-hour-45-minute session opens with one real, unresolved cross-disciplinary question — and closes with a draft artifact tested against a stakeholder who could actually act on it. There are no lectures. There is a scaffold, three differentiated faculty roles, and a deck of evidence the professors pull on demand as the conversation asks for it.
Why this format, why now:commercial Earth observation, ground-station-as-a-service, open-source ML, cloud geospatial — capability that was exclusive to states a decade ago is now a credit-card purchase. Single-discipline mastery was the right credential for the world where capability was scarce. Now that capability has democratized, cross-disciplinary judgment is the binding constraint — and that's a skill you can't earn from one set of slides.
Three professors, three roles
The reason three professors in one room doesn't collapse into headbutting.
Three professors trying to drive the same class is chaos. Three professors playing three different roles against the same question is the only model that actually produces cross-disciplinary work. Each week, every professor holds one of the three roles below. Roles rotate weekly across the 7.5-week module.
Architect
Owns the day's framing. Keeps the question alive. Does not drive to a conclusion.
One of the three professors holds the Architect role each week. Their job is to make sure the open question doesn't collapse into a slide deck — and to surface the constraint the cohort is dancing around but hasn't named.
Critic
Adversarial counter-frame. "What if the opposite is true?" "What assumption are you not naming?"
The Critic is the professor who refuses the cohort's first easy synthesis. They surface the dissenting evidence, the off-discipline counter-argument, the case where the emerging consensus would have produced a disaster. This role rotates so every professor practices being the loyal opposition.
Synthesizer
Collects threads, names emerging patterns, does not impose them.
The Synthesizer is the professor who notices when three students from three disciplines are circling the same idea using different vocabulary — and gives the idea a name the whole cohort can use afterward. They never present The Answer; they present The Question The Cohort Just Surfaced.
Why it works
No professor is competing for “the right answer.” They are playing different jobs against the same question. The cohort sees the same idea attacked from three angles — and learns to attack their own ideas the same way. That is the actual transferable skill of the program.
Cards, not slides
Each professor brings a deck of ~30 cards. The cohort decides which ones get pulled.
A card is a primary source, a dataset, a case study, a framework, or a deliberate provocation. A declassified GAO report on a $400M overrun. A satellite image of a Russian airbase. A two-page case on Iridium's bankruptcy. A 90-second clip of an FAA hearing. A back-of-envelope orbital-mechanics calc.
Cards get pulled on demand as the discussion requires them — not in pre-determined sequence. Three professors × 30 cards = a 90-card library the cohort can navigate live. The conversation, not the slides, drives the pull.
Example card pull
Cohort asks: “How do we know the supply-chain assumption isn't hiding a single point of failure?”
- Lead pulls: the Iridium 1.0 sole-source-magnetometer case
- SCM guest pulls: the 2011 Tohoku earthquake auto-industry single-supplier collapse
- Health Solutions guest pulls: the 2020 ventilator-supply cross-substitution analysis from COVID
Three disciplines, three precedents, one shared question. None of this was on a slide before the cohort asked.
The 7.5-week arc
Fifteen sessions. One open question. One artifact tested against a real stakeholder.
Two days per week × 2h 45min per session × 7.5 weeks. The Lead professor attends every session for continuity. Each Guest professor rotates in for roughly seven sessions in their discipline's window plus the triad bookends.
Session 1
Triad opening
All 3 professors + named stakeholder
Frame the open question. Introduce the stakeholder persona the cohort will defend the final artifact to. Lay out the three discipline lenses that will be in play.
Sessions 2–5
Discipline A depth
Lead + School A guest
Get deep on the first discipline's frame. School A guest temporarily holds the Architect role — drives their lens. Lead plays Critic; cards from the other two schools enter as provocations.
Session 6
Triad mid-frame
All 3 professors
Surface tensions that School A's lens raised. The cohort starts a working draft of their artifact.
Sessions 7–10
Discipline B depth
Lead + School B guest
Switch to the second discipline's lens. The artifact gets re-stressed against B's framing. Things that survived A but break under B get named — that's where the cross-disciplinary work no single-discipline program produces actually lives.
Session 11
Triad reconciliation
All 3 professors
Critic role is explicit. The cohort defends the artifact against each professor in sequence. Unresolvable tensions get scoped as the artifact's stated assumptions, not buried.
Sessions 12–14
Student-led synthesis sprints
Lead + rotating guest
Students drive the artifact through final iteration. Professors play Critic and Synthesizer only — they do not draft.
Session 15
Final verifier session
All 3 professors + a live stakeholder
A real person in that stakeholder seat — a former Associate Administrator, a sitting Senate staffer, an active GP, an FAA examiner — questions the cohort for two hours. The artifact has to survive their first three questions.
15
Sessions / module
2 days/week × 7.5 weeks
~41h
Class time / module
2h 45min per session
3
ASU schools / class
Lead + 2 Rotating Guests
The cohort journal
Every class ends with three lines. Across 12 weeks, those lines become the cohort's most valuable artifact.
What worked
An insight that earned its keep — survived a Critic, fits an actual stakeholder, generalizes past the case it came from.
What surprised
An assumption the cohort had silently agreed on that broke when stress-tested. These are where the capstone-defining cross-disciplinary insights live.
What's open
A thread to pull next week — what the Architect picks up to keep the question alive across sessions.
Why the journal compounds across the cohort
By Week 8, students can read Week 1's entries and watch their own cohort's thinking evolve. By Week 15, the journal is the substrate for the capstone. By graduation, it is a defensible record of an original cross-disciplinary thinking practice — something no transcript captures and no single-discipline program produces. No other graduate program has this.
Structure, not chaos
Open, but not aimless.
What this is NOT
- "We'll discuss space governance today" — no anchor, no artifact.
- Three professors improvising in parallel and stepping on each other.
- A lecture series with classroom Q&A bolted on at the end.
- Slides as the content; discussion as flavor.
- Output that evaporates the moment class ends.
What it IS
- One named open question per session — with a stakeholder verifier on the other end.
- Three named roles (Architect / Critic / Synthesizer) rotating across professors weekly.
- Cards pulled on demand as the discussion asks for them.
- Discussion as the content; the journal as the compounding artifact.
- An artifact every week, defended against a real persona, captured for the capstone.
Want to see this in practice?
Read the six classes and the three schools that co-teach each one — with two inputs-to-output examples per module that show what cross-disciplinary actually means here.