Interdisciplinary Bridges: Concepts that Travel

Jessica RobeyElise Takehana

Authors & Articles

• David J. Sill, “Integrative Thinking, Synthesis, and Creativity in Interdisciplinary Studies” (1996)

• Roger F. Malina, “Third Culture? From the Arts to the Sciences and Back Again” (2012)

• Rebecca Nowacek, “Toward a Theory of Interdisciplinary Connections: A Classroom Study of Talk and Text” (2007)

DISCIPLINARY VERSUS INTERDISCIPLINARY KNOWING

Interdisciplinary Bridges

Why be interdisciplinary?

• Encourages creative and critical thinking• Teaches students how to transfer skills and knowledge across

disciplines by synthesizing and building on what they have learned.

How to make it work?What strategies will teach our students not only the shape and nature of the disciplines, but also the shape and nature of thoughtitself?

How do our students understand the process of learning a discipline?

Too many students tend to view a discipline as something like this:a distinct container stuffed full of information, geared for a specific destination even when it occasionally spills out of its boundaries. Their learning process, as they narrowly define it, involves stuffing the contents of the discipline into their own heads.

However, learning a discipline can more profitably be understood as a scaffolding process, in which each segment of knowledgebecomes a part of a larger structure, with each part helping to support an ever-growing whole, thus creating a system of knowledge.

In the suitcase model of learning, students are concerned with accumulating knowledge applicable to a specific purpose and discipline.

In an interdisciplinary context, the scaffolding model of learning can be emphasized to show how concepts and skills can be used not only to build up our knowledge in one area, but also to create bridges and connections to other areas of knowledge. Furthermore, the bird’s-eyeview the scaffold affords encourages students to contemplate the contours of each discipline from a new perspective.

Spectrum of Disciplinarity

In order to fully take advantage of the new perspectives aninterdisciplinary approach can offer, we need to understandhow this approach differs from other ways of teaching andlearning.

• Disciplinary approach• Multidisciplinary approach• Transdisciplinary approach• Interdisciplinary approach

Interdisciplinary: A Definition

• “the point where two or more disciplines integrate methods and insights but where the disciplines remain intact, creating a tension between separate ways of knowing” (Sill 132).

Traveling concepts and theproblem of translation

• Each “way of knowing” depends on terms and concepts specific to the discipline.

• Übersetzen (translate): To carry something from one side of the river to another.

• Each bank of the river is different:– Concepts transform, grow,

change when they travel– The journeys there and back are

different– Barter over the river, don’t pave

over it (Malina 180-1)

Crossing disciplinary boundaries

• Take one concept across the river of your discipline to that of your group mates. Consider the: – concept’s value and use in the

disciplines– methods of approaching the

concept in the disciplines– what transfers and what

doesn’t when the concept travels

• Narrative• Frame• Tradition• Memory• Intent• Materiality• Consciousness• Death and Life• Beauty

Crossing disciplinary boundaries: Development Day, Spring 2014

Crossing disciplinary boundaries: integrative thinking, synthesis, & creativity

• Dissonance between disciplines triggers creative/integrative thinking in an effort to resolve contradictions and tensions caused by the collision of different disciplinary ways of knowing. Disconnected material or ideas are synthesized into something new.

• Creative thought requires both free play, outside the rules of the discipline, AND the tension created by problematizing (or “making absurd”) a subject or idea offered within a single discipline. “By its very nature, creativity violates the present order in creating new order.” (Sill 135) Creative energy is released by crossing disciplinary boundaries, but those boundaries must still remain for this to happen. “Tension between the disciplines…is essential in order to reach integrative thought.” (Sill 132)

INTERDISCIPLINARITY IN THE CLASSROOM

Interdisciplinary Bridges

Rebecca Nowacek and Linked Courses

• Interdisc II composed of three 3cr class in Villanova University’s honors program (Nowacek 374)– Literature– History– Religious Studies

• Analyzed papers, transcripts of class sessions, and interviews with students and professors for three types of interdisciplinary connections (Nowacek 377-9)– Content– Propositions– Ways of knowing

In class discussions content connections were the most common and ways of knowing connections the least common.

Nowacek findings

Nowacek findings

• Proposition connections were longer and tended towards agreement rather than disagreement

• Student connection in class discussion and writing assignments mirrored patterns of professor connections in class

• 43% of students made interdisciplinary connections in their papers even though this was not explicitly required.

• The reaction paper (an ungraded, informal assignment that is not a disciplinary genre) was most effective in eliciting the more complex interdisciplinary connect of propositions and ways of knowing.

Ways of knowing in theory and practice

• Assumptions, activities, and values inherent in the methods of a discipline (Nowacek 383).– History: “texts elucidate a knowable past” (Nowacek

384)– Literature: “texts [serve] as evidence of a historical

figure’s views or intention” (Nowacek 385)• Ways of knowing requires dialogue between

disciplines and metadisciplinary awareness.• Professors have to model explicit connections

between disciplines for students to do so.

Encouraging Ways of Knowing in the Classroom

• Elise Takehana

– Readings on the same topic by authors from ranging fields (ENGL 1100)

– Explicitly researching across disciplines to write researched cultural analyses (ENGL 1200)

Encouraging Ways of Knowing in the Classroom

• Jessica Robey

In class exercise: considering a 17th century Dutch still life painting from various disciplinary perspectives.

Break into groups and discuss how other disciplines (outside of art history) might look at this work. What kinds of questions does the painting raise? What avenues of inquiry could be explored? What might we learn about the world from studying the painting from these various perspectives?

Pieter Claesz, “Vanitas Still Life,” c. 1630

What ways do you encourage exploring ways of knowing in the classroom? How is this limited or challenging?

INTERDISCIPLINARITY ACROSS CAMPUS

Interdisciplinary Bridges

Broader Interdisciplinary Patterns

• Interdisciplinary minors (Women’s Studies, American Studies)

• Revisions to the IDIS major

• Efforts at assembling learning communities

• Establishing a university community read (Jim Crow)

• LA&S conversations about ePortfolio potential

• LA&S Advanced Option C

LA&S Advanced Option C

X is a Renaissance man who, while an English Studies Professional Writing major, X is interested in the creative mind and the motives and thoughts of artists as they work.

To explore such an interest X thought it crucial to take further courses in psychology. His time in Abnormal Psychology also reminded him of some of his work in drawing and painting in high school. He thus wanted to take courses in both fields simultaneously to continue thinking consciously about the links between creative expression and the workings of the mind.

• Learning communities• Interdisciplinary study

groups• Team-taught

interdisciplinary courses

• Collaborative learning/projects

• Problem based learning

• Special “cross-pollination” assignments

• Community service/activism

• Capstone projects and/or portfolios (e-portfolios?)

• More systematic mediation

Possible Strategies for Interdisciplinarity

What are feasible starting points for expanding interdisciplinarity at Fitchburg State?

Works Cited

Malina, Roger F. “Third culture? From the arts to thesciences and back again.” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of

Speculative Research 10.3 (2012): 179-183. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Mar. 2014.Nowacek, Rebecca S. “Toward a Theory of

Interdisciplinary Connections: A Classroom Study of Talk and Text.” Research in the Teaching of English 41.4 (2007): 368-401. Academic Search Premier Web. 12 Mar. 2014.Sill, David J. “Integrative Thinking, Synthesis, and

Creativity in Interdisciplinary Studies.” The Journal of General Education 45.2 (1996): 129-151. JSTOR. Web. 8 May 2014.