Initial Research
Video by John Stern, West Peak Media, 2001
Faculty Understanding
Watching Ourselves Work
 

Initial Research

In 1999-2000, during my year as a Carnegie Scholar, I completed the first stage of a research project on how students make sense of interdisciplinary courses. The project emerged out of an upper-division American literature course that used a fairly simple cross-disciplinary model. I had incorporated historical context, including extensive discussions of historical trends and issues, social structures, analysis of the causes and processes of social change. Yet at the end, despite having participated in many course discussions that linked specific texts to historical developments and issues, students too often made only the vaguest of gestures toward incorporating historical information into their papers. I wanted to understand why they were not better able to make effective use of history in their study of literature. 

To find out more about students' perspectives on interdisciplinarity and why they found "doing interdisciplinarity" so difficult, I surveyed and interviewed students in a number of interdisciplinary courses, as well as their teachers. The courses used a variety of models of interdisciplinarity, ranging from very clear, focused examples of cross-disciplinarity (such as a literature course that used visual arts both to provide a greater sense of historical context and to expand students' skills at text analysis by working with different kinds of texts) to courses that drew on a number of disciplines without giving any overt attention to the disciplinary roots involved (as in a course on feminist theory that incorporated psychology, philosophy, media, and sociology without overtly identifying these disciplines). I also reviewed many examples of students' work. 

What I discovered is not all that surprising: students and faculty understand that combining multiple approaches and diverse materials can yield deeper understanding of an issue, event, or concept, but both students and faculty have difficulty defining clearly what interdisciplinarity is or how to construct and complete interdisciplinary analyses. 
 


Faculty Understanding of Interdisciplinarity

Part of the problem, I think, is that few of those who teach interdisciplinary courses have significant training in interdisciplinary methods. While increasing numbers of scholars may define their work as interdisciplinary, few are familiar with interdisciplinary theory, and most struggle to explain just how they combine materials and approaches from multiple disciplines. When I tried to develop my own explanations, I found that even with some background in interdisciplinarity, I had difficulty explaining clearly what I do. While many scholars have been deeply involved in discussions about interdisciplinary theory, through organizations such as the Association for Integrative Studies or participation in local and national discussions of general education, most of the faculty who teach interdisciplinary courses have had little or no exposure to these intellectual conversations. They come to interdisciplinary teaching out of their own research practice, because they want to teach something that doesn't fit into their departmental course offerings, because they want to participate in general education programs that embrace interdisciplinarity, or out of a commitment to area studies - Africana, American, Environmental, Ethnic, Queer, or Women's Studies most commonly. Such work is clearly valuable, and the faculty involved are neither naïve nor ill-intentioned. But it's understandable that they might not have fully explored the meaning and practice of interdisciplinarity. Almost no general education or area studies programs require faculty to do anything other than develop a course, and most faculty enter the course planning process with a focus on the content. 

Many of those who teach interdisciplinary courses cross disciplinary boundaries in their own research all the time. A literary scholar may spend as much time reading historical documents as she does reading poetry, and she will probably ask questions and build mental models about what happened and why that are quite similar to those constructed by a historian. Similarly, a historian may read paintings or maps both as historical documents and as representations of the perspectives of their creators and their audiences. 

Sometimes, these scholars may be asking very disciplinary questions:

  • what is the significance of this text?
  • why did people living at a certain time believe in a certain concept? 
  • why did a particular city develop in certain ways? 
At other times, we may ask more truly interdisciplinary questions: 
  • what role did reading play in the lives of women workers in the 1910s? 
  • how has the culture of industrial communities changed as we have shifted toward a more service-oriented economy? 
  • how does open space affect contemporary urban life? 

Watching Ourselves Work

The problem isn't that faculty don't know how to think in cross- or even interdisciplinary terms. It's that we don't pay close enough attention to how we do what we do. And this may be a problem for teachers in all areas, regardless of what they teach. We know the content and the theory so well that we don't always pay close attention to our own knowledge, methods, assumptions, and disciplinary cultures. One of the key concepts in the Visible Knowledge Project is the exploration of how "expert learners" think, and discussions of this idea reveal how difficult but also exciting it is for faculty to try to observe and describe their own intellectual processes. 

In other words, if I wanted to help my students learn to be conscious and deliberate about linking and synthesizing disciplines, I needed to begin by looking more closely at my own practices. I recognized that my own scholarship often occurs in an incremental, dialogic manner. I usually begin with texts, largely because of my background in studying literature and popular culture, and then I apply historical knowledge, both information about the cultural issues and structures that were in play at any given moment and concepts about what texts are and how they might be read. Thus, I might move from reading a text as an aesthetic and carefully constructed fabrication to reading it as evidence of its creator's perspective on his or her culture, as a document that readers of the time would have encountered, as one piece in a much larger puzzle of information and insight. All of this implies theory, assumptions that I make about the relationship between texts and history. I approach texts and history as linked through theories of agency, power, and representations - theories which lead me to assume that texts represent interested positions, and that the creators and users of texts both have a stake in the text. Thus I might envision the process of creating an interdisciplinary analysis as a triangular discussion between texts, history (which includes social structures, political issues, cultural trends, and material reality/lived experience), and theory. 

Among other things, the process of thinking through what I do as an interdisciplinary scholar led me to recognize that self-awareness itself may be a valuable element in improving interdisciplinary understanding. I had worked previously with learning portfolios and self-assessment, and I had come to believe that self-awareness could strengthen student learning by helping students become conscious of what they did and did not understand. Yet I also sought a balance between doing and reflecting, and the course goals included issues other than understanding interdisciplinarity. Putting it all together in a manageable and effective package would be a challenge.