Can you teach interdisciplinarity in 10 weeks?

Interdisciplinarity has an ambitious goal: tackling real-world, complex problems. This is why higher education institutions are incorporating it into their strategic thinking, and why more students keenly aware of the uncertainty of their future are coming to university demanding a different kind of education. But can you really be that ambitious in a 10-week module?

In this article, I will address some challenges and practical ways to overcome them based on my experience of teaching a core module that introduces students to interdisciplinarity on the University of Birmingham’s liberal arts and natural sciences programme.

Define and frame interdisciplinarity

If you don’t define interdisciplinarity at the start of a module, it can become a buzzword that’s confused with multidisciplinarity, which also draws on multiple disciplines but doesn’t involve integration. You must also explain why interdisciplinarity is necessary, as integration is always a means to an end, so make its purpose to your module clear. In our module, the aim is to gain an interdisciplinary understanding of a topic: students must integrate claims from multiple disciplines to produce a new, interdisciplinary claim.

Structure the process

Interdisciplinarity demands that students combine different perspectives, handle conflicting methodologies and create new knowledge. Not surprisingly, the experience of interdisciplinary research is often marked by ambiguity, leading to anxiety and affecting students’ satisfaction.

Providing students with a research process can give them a roadmap. In our module, we use Allen Repko and Rick Szostak’s Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory, which is the most popular and student-friendly model.

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Using a research process has another advantage. Every example of interdisciplinarity brings together a unique set of variables, disciplines, topics, questions and integrations. When students practise it in a module, they may wonder how much is transferable to another example with different combinations of disciplines, topics and questions. Learning a research process will support them in the future.

Manage the workload

Interdisciplinarians don’t need to be experts, but they can’t be tourists in the disciplines they’re using either. Students need an adequate understanding of them to integrate claims from them properly. This adds a heavy workload on top of learning about the module’s subject, such as a real-world problem and dealing with the unique demands of integration.

We use group work to address this issue. We divide students into groups of four or five and ask each group member to apply a different discipline. Where possible, we ensure that no two group members use the same discipline; if they do, they must apply different aspects of it to provide varied perspectives. Their task is to gain a good understanding of their disciplinary approach and teach it to the rest of their group.

This student-centred approach has three additional benefits. First, each group gets to choose the topic they want to study for the duration of the module. Second, it makes group members more accountable to each other, reducing the chances of “free riding”. Third, since a student can’t control the disciplines their fellow group members choose, it motivates them to be more open-minded, experiencing the freedom that interdisciplinarity offers.

Practise integration

This is the biggest challenge. “How much integration is enough?” is a common question. It doesn’t help that much of the research process is multidisciplinary. This is why it’s essential to define the purpose of integration at the start of a module. If the aim is to create new knowledge, does the integration of claims advance the argument?

To make matters more difficult, although integration can occur at any time, it takes centre stage in the process only after a thorough study of the topic and the disciplinary approaches being applied to it. In other words, towards the end of term, when students are juggling assignments from other modules – at the point when worried minds might become more strategic, we’re asking them to be creative and original.

Because every integration is unique, teaching it poses challenges. This is why it’s so important to get the earlier steps in the process right. Presenting examples, including analysing previous student works, can help with this. We run a stand-alone lecture near the end of the module to discuss integration and introduce good and bad examples. Books like the Repko and Szostak texts also contain useful examples and advice. 

Multidisciplinarity is less demanding than interdisciplinarity and also helps to provide a holistic understanding of a topic. However, each discipline, on its own, cannot address wicked or messy problems. Interdisciplinarity is harder to teach, but it can be a richly rewarding and exciting experience. Although we can only achieve so much in 10 weeks, a successful interdisciplinary module can empower students and train them to think like interdisciplinarians.

Simon Scott is a liberal arts and natural sciences associate professor at the University of Birmingham.

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