Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

Theory and Practice

Balasubramanyam Chandramohan, Stephen Fallows

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134295920
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As universities increasingly offer courses that break the confines of a single subject area, more students are enrolling on interdisciplinary programmes within multidisciplinary departments. Teaching and learning within interdisciplinary study requires new approaches, including an understanding of the critical perspectives and frameworks and the rearranging of intellectual and professional boundaries.

Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching in Higher Education explores the issues and tensions provoked by interdisciplinary learning, offering helpful information for:

• Staff development
• Distance learning
• Mass communication courses
• Interdisciplinary science courses

Grounded in thorough research, this collection is the first of its kind to provide practical advice and guidance from around the world, improving the quality of teaching and learning in interdisciplinary programmes.

I
Horizontal

Matters that Apply across Entire Programs

1
“Problems May Cut Right across the Borders”

Why We Cannot Do Without Interdisciplinarity

R. J. ELLIS
University of Birmingham

Interdisciplinarity in higher education teaching has, since the mid-1970s, become ever more clearly defined. It is increasingly regarded as a learning mode involving the exploration of issues, problems, knowledge, and understanding through the integration and synthesis of theoretical or methodological procedures or both which draw upon more than one discipline and/or challenge conventional disciplinary approaches. Typically individuals or (more often) teams integrate information, techniques, perspectives, and/or concepts and theories from two or more disciplines or they develop or draw upon new alternatives.

Yet, despite efforts to become clearer about what the term means, a common verdict remains that interdisciplinary study is, in the words of Alan Liu, “the most seriously underthought critical, pedagogical and institutional concept in the modern academy” (Liu, 1989, p. 743). As Julie Klein puts it,

interdisciplinarity has been variously defined … as a methodology, a concept, a process, a way of thinking, a philosophy, and a reflexive ideology. It has been linked with attempts to expose the dangers of fragmentation, to re-establish old connections, to explore emerging relations, and to create new subjects adequate to handle our practical and conceptual needs … [as] a means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using single methods or approaches. (Klein, 1990, p. 196)

Perhaps then I need to start by saying that in this chapter I am not going to seek to resolve all these problems. It could be argued, vis à vis Klein, that interdisciplinarity is in fact all of the above, which makes it a complex beast. Faced with such multi-facetedness, it is, I think, still the case that developing interdisciplinary learning approaches usually proves to be daunting, and is especially challenging at the level of syllabus design, just because of a continuing level of “underthinking” concerning what exactly interdisciplinarity might constitute and entail. Liu’s comment highlights how difficult it is to teach interdisciplinarily, just because the very concept of what it might be remains somewhat “underthought.”

Nevertheless, it has long seemed no more than plain common sense to seek to link up the different, supposedly separate, “discrete” disciplines and explore their interstices—the “spaces” in between them, simply because we do not experience our humanity or the world in terms of separate disciplines and can never understand our existence or environment in such a discipline-based way; we cannot think so fragmentedly in our day-to-day experience. So the issue of how to seek to stitch things together has to be addressed in a way going beyond the mere invocation of the word. Consequently it can be argued that:

Interdisciplinary thinking is rapidly becoming an integral feature of research as a result of four powerful “drivers”: the inherent complexity of nature and society, the desire to explore problems and questions that are not confined to a single discipline, the need to solve societal problems, and the power of new technologies. (COSEPUP, 2004, p. 2)

Another reason why the task is important is an instrumental one. More and more often various governmental and quasi-autonomous funding bodies that exist have expressed an interest in supporting the development of interdisciplinary research: for example, in the U.K. this is true of the three government-funded Research Councils plus the Leverhulme Trust, and the Wellcome Trust. Indeed, by now innumerable successful interdisciplinary research projects have been established and in important respects interdisciplinary research activity is flourishing. As academics come to invest more and more of their intellectual energies in such work, the expectation must be that this approach will extend more and more often to their teaching engagements as well. Therefore the need to be clear about what the concept constitutes and involves is obviously important at this time.

When approaching this task, it is perhaps still necessary to begin, as it were, at the beginning. Though arguments for an integrative approach to research and learning have been advanced from Plato through von Humboldt, the term “interdisciplinary” as it is generally understood today probably originated in the early decades of the twentieth century. Firstly there were the scientific studies of the Vienna Circle on the philosophy of science from 1907 onwards, which sought to bring the clarification of philosophy—through the method of logical analysis—to the examination of all problems and assertions (drawing heavily on Wittgenstein). This scientific world-conception of the Vienna Circle is characterized “essentially by two features. First it is empricist and positivist [… and] Second, the scientific world-conception is marked by the application of a certain method, namely logical analysis” (Sarkar, 1996, p. 331). However, though its integrationist impulses meant that it did indeed seek to cross over the spaces between disciplines, the Vienna Circle never seems to have used the word “interdisciplinary.”

Perhaps a little surprisingly, it was instead the social sciences that coined the term. It might have been anticipated that the term “interdisciplinary” would find its origins in the sciences, since these have always pursued research drawing on more than one discipline:

The history of science from the time of the earliest scholarship abounds with examples of the integration of knowledge from many research fields. The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander brought together his knowledge of geology, paleontology, and biology to discern that living beings develop from simpler to more complex forms. In the age of the great scientific revolutions of 17th-century Europe, its towering geniuses—Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley, Robert Boyle, and others—brought their curiosity to bear not only on subjects that would lead to basic discoveries that bear their names but also on every kind of interdisciplinary challenge, including military and mining questions. In the 19th century, Louis Pasteur became a model interdisciplinarian, responding to practical questions about diseases and wine spoilage with surprising answers that laid the foundations of microbiology and immunology. (COSEPUP, 2004, p. 17)

Despite this, the term “interdisciplinar[it]y” seems to have been first used within the portals of the United States’ Social Science Research Council. In the 1920s, documents produced by the Social Science Research Council, as part of the development of “A Constructive Program for the SSRC,” mention the SSRC’s desire to foster research “which brings in more than one discipline” (Robert Sessions Woodworth, quoted in Frank, 1988, p. 91; Klein, 1990, pp. 19–25).

Perhaps these early twentieth-century origins within the Vienna Circle and the U.S.’s SSRC are unsurprising. The Vienna Circle’s work was an “endeavour … to link and harmonise the achievements of individual investigators in their various fields of science” (Sarkar, 1996, p. 328) and as such was an endeavor to establish a synthetic approach to the growing complexities of scientific enquiry. This burgeoning complexity meant that “big pictures” became harder and harder to arrive at. The Vienna Circle’s goal, therefore, was “unified science” (Sarkar, 1996, p. 328). A similar burgeoning of the constituent disciplines within the social sciences was occurring at more or less the same time. The social sciences were rapidly widening in scope, leading, for example, to Margaret Mead calling in 1931 for “co-operation, for cross-fertilization in the social sciences.” Here, the objective is more to do with the idea of exploring the “inter-”—the spaces between disciplines—and less on what might be described as the Vienna Circle’s ontological and metasynthetic motivations.

Since these tentative beginnings in the early decades of the twentieth century, use of both the concept of interdisciplinarity and the word itself has rapidly grown, especially in the latter quarter of the twentieth century and the opening decade of the twenty-first. But the Vienna Circle’s desire to seek unification and the SSRC’s desire to establish links between disciplines perhaps illustrate two main thrusts hidden within the term “interdisciplinarity.” Firstly, there is, recurrently, a desire to attain a universality which, this approach’s advocates argue, is impeded by the fragmentation resulting from discipline-based approaches. Secondly there is a desire to search out what might be called “interdisciplines”—modes of enquiry moving between the frames of the established disciplines, def[r]aming their supposed adequacy. This latter can be represented conservatively as “conjunctive interaction” (Cluck, 1980, p. 67) or—more radically—as an entirely new mode of systemic conceptualization. I think it can be argued that searches for a metanarrative of conceptual enquiry have somewhat ebbed away, bruised by the assault of post-structuralist theorizations, with their mistrust of such “meta” aspirations (Lyotard, 1979). Instead, priority is placed upon seeking modes of exploring the interstices and gaps between disciplines—their liminal thresholds, as they might be called—that reconfigure and at the same time destabilize the disciplines themselves.

The appealingly radical sound of this endeavor—an upset of the organization of the academy—can in turn be related to the ructions in the social sciences and humanities in the late 1960s and the way these subsequently led to reconsiderations of the relationship between power and knowledge. Such reconsiderations also—arguably relatedly—stemmed in important respects from the development of a whole range of sociologies in the mid-twentieth century (of knowledge, of literature, of power, of gender, of the sciences, etc.). These sociological forays into the other disciplines demanded that interdisciplinary consideration be extended, as academics in the sciences, humanities, and the social sciences encountered and interacted with their sociological counterparts. The widespread educational disruptions of 1968 (in Paris, London, the U.S., and elsewhere) intensified this trend towards revolutionary redefinition, aimed as it was (at least in part) at the academy (including its constituent discipline-based departments) and characterized as it was by an impatience with what was seen as a general institutional conservatism—manifested most plainly in a failure to resist the perceived injustices of this period. Certainly this provides one way of understanding how it was that varieties of political, social, and (subsequently) cultural theory came to such prominence at this time. In particular, humanities academics became engaged in often bruising but always productive exchanges with social scientists, leading to the importation of new modes of theorization, often embracing interdisciplinary concepts and concerns.

This set of revolutionary endeavors, sponsored by 1960s radicalism, radical sociologists, and the interface between them, might be described as the romantic discourse of interdisciplinary enquiry. For a time this approach helped render interdisciplinary work highly attractive, occurring as it did during a period of some social unrest. Indeed, arguably, this sort of radical appeal lingers on into the twenty-first century. When Roberta Frank in 1988 argued that “ ‘Interdisciplinary’ has something to please everyone … the Latinate discipline comes encased in stainless steel; it suggests something rigorous, aggressive, hazardous to master; Inter hints that knowledge is … warm, mutually developing, consultative” she is ironically alluding to this enduring radical, communitarian appeal (Frank, 1988, p. 100). Or, as Tony Bennett put it in an enjoyable pun, interdisciplinarity can break out from the disciplines’ inherent “disciplining” of thought (Bennett, 1998).¹ However, it can be argued that any such stress upon interdisciplinarity’s reforming, innovative, and progressive potential—getting beyond the discipline’s “disciplining”—worked to the disadvantage of the approach by helping to keep the term nebulous (and so more romantically appealing). Consequently in 1980 Cluck could complain with some legitimacy that “much of the discourse which purports to be interdisciplinary betrays a soft foundation which gives way under probing” (Cluck, 1980, p. 87).

Importantly, however, and increasingly often, the idea of interdisciplinarity has moved away from being colored by such a romantic representation and its accentuation of what might be called the “soft” connotations of the term. Instead interdisciplinarity has become invested by discourses articulating a general requirement for exploration of new areas of potential knowledge and discovery and proposing that certain problems were particularly amenable to interdisciplinary research (Maasen, 2000, p. 174). This is true in the humanities and social sciences, yet even more true in the sciences, where scientific and technological advances, accelerated by Second World War and Cold War research, opened up the possibilities of new kinds of conjunctive research between physics and the other sciences in particular at first, and then biological science and the other sciences in close succession, as well as between all of these and engineering.

This was a process depending upon a more rigorous understanding of what interdisciplinary work constitutes. Consequently, an important first step in apprehending this development depends upon drawing up distinctions between multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and disciplinarity in research and teaching. Multidisciplinary study involves employing two or more disciplines in juxtaposition. But “these separate disciplines never intersect upon a well-defined matrix” (Cluck, 1980, p. 68). Instead the process of research and learning is additive (Klein, 1990, p. 56). By contrast, interdisciplinary work is integrationist and consultative. Though, of course, “there is some overlap between interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary study,” nevertheless “for the most part they are different areas” (Kline, 1995, p. 2). Interdisciplinary work is much more firmly rooted in “conjunctive interaction” (Cluck, 1980, p. 68; Klein, 2000, p. 56). The approach is synthetic (the prefix “inter-” requiring a degree of synthesizing) (Kline, 1995, p. 2), and hinges upon the establishment of a central focus (conceptual, theoretical, and/or methodological).

Arguably this sort of interaction became easier in the late twentieth century, as the pressure of increasing amounts of interdisciplinary work ensured that discipline boundaries became more blurred in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities (Klein, 2000, p. 7). Hence, understanding interdisciplinarity demands an understanding of its relationship to disciplinarity.

When drawing up this distinction between discipline-based and interdisciplinary work, a starting point is the idea that disciplinary exploration depending upon identifying a category of knowledge which can be conventionally identified as belonging to that discipline. A discipline may therefore be defined as “a specific body of teachable knowledge with its own background of education, training, procedures, methods and content areas” (Berger, 1970). Such a definition is perhaps both too narrow, for it offers no sense of the dynamism of each and every discipline’s evolution, and too wide, needing to be more specific about how “procedures and methods” might be effectively differentiated (Gozzer, 1982, p. 286). Yet, as a definition it is helpful, because it suggests how both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches might work. Where multidisciplinary approaches draw separately upon the existing disciplines’ own methods and procedures (alongside one another, with, broadly, any bridging not being explicit), interdisciplinary work explicitly seeks to integrate or establish “interdisciplinary” methods and procedures (effecting some sort of bridging or synthesis). But such a distinction also, inevitably, raises the issue of the appropriate relationship of the disciplines to each other and to the larger intellectual terrain in which these disciplines are located (Kline, 1995, p. 2).

Considering these “territorial” issues has been termed the study of “disciplinarity” (Messer-Davidow et al., 1993). This defining of the discipline and its (“unique”) methods and procedures has long been a feature of most disciplines’ syllabi at some point. But increasingly such self-reflexive examinations highlight how the establishment of such genealogies (between disciplines) sets up boundaries—“borders”—that must be identified as relative and not essential, even as they are patrolled. Specifically, this is because disciplines a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Horizontal: Matters that Apply across Entire Programs
• Part II Vertical: Matters that Apply to a Field of Study
• Conclusion: Towards Interdisciplinarity in the Twenty-First Century