About CIESD's Partners

A unique strength of CIESD rests in the collaboration of this academic "odd-couple" (oceanographer and religious historian) who have worked to blend the strengths and perspectives of their individual disciplines. In addition, the partners’ fundamental identities as educators and the power of system dynamics (SD) contribute to CIESD’s ability to provide and to model an open-minded interdisciplinary problem solving approach to complex real-world issues and educational challenges. Each partner brings to this collaboration high level academic training, significant scholarly productivity, a drive to support learning, and a fundamental commitment to use problem-solving as an incentive and as a vehicle to foster collaboration, communication, and analytical capacity building.

Jeff Potash is an American historian and educator with a particular focus on the use of system dynamics to support individual and organizational learning. John Heinbokel is an aquatic ecologist and educator who focuses on the use of system dynamics to support individual and organizational learning.

They have worked together since 1989 in utilizing SD to support:

• their disciplinary teaching at the college level;
• collaborative inter- or cross-disciplinary teaching in middle school, high school, and college;
• pre- and in-service teacher training;
• exploration of the dynamics of educational organizations;
• problem-solving in human service organizations; and
• development of new approaches to understand and incorporate human behavioral responses in models of extreme events (such as bioterrorism) in addition to other less intense social, economic, and political risk scenarios.