Teaching interdisciplinarity

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For students to learn interdisciplinarity, teachers need to be self-conscious of how they do it themselves, and to provide incremental means of acquiring the skills.

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The Cloudworks Team
16 June 2008

Students often find interdisciplinarity difficult; for example, literature students may make little use of the historical information presented in their course. The lecturer in this case set out, first, to be more explicit and self-conscious about what kind of interdisiciplinary thinking was required, and then to develop strategies to help students learn this. The three strategies used were: (1) repeated use of a tool (a five-part question structure) to analyse texts as they are encountered; (2) presenting and discussing models of interdisciplinarity; and (3) leading students into interdisciplinary analysis incrementally, first analysing single written texts, then identifying links between different kinds of texts, and finally integrating texts with historical context. [Sherry Linkon]

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Leslie Carr
5:28pm 22 January 2010

I'm teaching a new MSc in Web Science, which takes a highly interdisciplinary perspective. It tries to synthesize a view from the perspectives of computer science, social science, economics, law, maths, psychology and others, with lecturers from each discipline being involved in the teaching and curriculum planning.

I'd be really interested in hearing others' experience in this kind of activity. Having done it for a year, I'm beginning to doubt whether what I'm doing isn't just defining a new disciplinary perspective which has just borrowed half a dozen different methodologies and techniques, but is none the less a SINGLE discipline (with a single approved pedagogy and a single degree-awarding process.)

Gráinne Conole
10:56am 23 January 2010

Sounds like an interesting course Les! Interdisciplianarity as you know is becoming increasingly important in reseach around the use of technology. We are exploring this in a small project at the moment which is looking at interdisciplianrity and TEL research. See this cloudscape for more on this.

I remembering being struck by the ID team involved in the e-Bank project you were involved with and the strengths that gave in terms of the diferent expertise but also the challenges of trying to develop a shared understanding.