Interdisciplinarity in teaching: what it is and how to make it work

What is interdisciplinary?

Interdisciplinary education is all the rage, but we don’t all mean the same thing by that phrase. Sometimes, the term ends up being used synonymously with “effective education that prepares students for a complex world”, which is not helpful as it focuses on an outcome rather than the process. There is also an association between interdisciplinarity and the idea of a “broad” or “generalist education” or getting students to learn or be exposed to multiple or contrasting subjects.

As with most buzzwords, neither those who praise interdisciplinarity nor those who complain about it can be assumed to be commenting on the same thing.

• Fostering interdisciplinary learning in large-scale doctoral programmes
• Designing postgraduate education as a means of sharing and developing academic and professional knowledge
• Developing research skills post-pandemic: creating space for reflection and conversation

So, it can be helpful to turn to scholarly definitions. Marilyn Stember of the University of Colorado defined interdisciplinarity as the “integration of the contributions of several disciplines to a problem or issue” where this integration “brings interdependent parts of knowledge into harmonious relationships”.

She also contrasts interdisciplinarity with:

• multidisciplinarity, when several disciplines “each provide a different perspective on a problem or issue”; and
• transdisciplinarity, which involves an even higher level of integration, where the disciplinary perspectives themselves fall away, to be replaced by a “unity of intellectual frameworks”.

How to put interdisciplinarity into practice when designing courses

How does all this look operationally within a single course? Probably the simplest way to introduce interdisciplinarity is to make sure that we consciously build courses around identifiable complex issues and topics, rather than disciplines.

Let’s take a standard intermediate economics course as an example – something like “Introduction to macroeconomics”. This will typically focus on teaching students a set of economic models and tools to analyse data and make predictions. In the same way, a course from psychology, maybe “developmental psychology”, will help students become familiar with the dominant theories in this subdiscipline.  

These lessons are much-needed milestones in the training of economists and psychologists. But what if we were to take our eyes off training someone as a disciplinary expert, and focus on offering them access to interdisciplinarity? It would seem more expedient to begin from the other direction – from issues and aspects in the world.

We might be thinking of the impact of ageing on the human mind, or the domestication of rice, or climate change mitigation, or managing the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. These are issues and topics that, by virtue of their natural complexity, require integration of insights and tools from a variety of disciplines – perhaps economics, and psychology, and physics, and chemistry, to name a few – in order to build understanding or find resolutions to these multifaceted problems.

Nonetheless, most university professors have PhDs in specific disciplines and are rewarded and promoted for producing highly specialised contributions (ie, “impactful” research that gains the approval of their equally specialised peers). Inevitably, this means instructors who can embody that integration of insights and tools don’t grow on trees and these skills need to be developed.

Teaching in interdisciplinary teams

One way to overcome this hurdle is to teach in teams. But if the team is merely multidisciplinary – colleagues from different disciplines each providing distinct perspectives on a problem or issue – we haven’t quite achieved that desired integration either.

The teams need to be true collaborations with a unity of purpose defined by the topic at hand. This requires professors who, while specialists in their own fields, are broad-minded in the way they approach the issues they care about and are not fastidious about disciplinary purity.

We are looking for colleagues whose involvement in such a course isn’t just so that they can “teach their share of physics, philosophy or computing” as part of a line-up of several topics, but instead to work together as a team, united by the joint aim of illuminating the shared topic for the benefit of the students. We need more academics able and willing to take this approach.

Interdisciplinarity in university programmes

So far, so good for the individual course. But what about at the programme level?

One plea I should make is that we do not mistakenly think that just because something is good, it must be implemented everywhere.

For students to profit from a topic-based interdisciplinary course, they will still need a good grounding in transferable foundational competencies, such as quantitative thinking, critical thinking, constructing written arguments, computational reasoning and empirical inquiry.

Otherwise, those topic-based interdisciplinary courses end up pitched too low. What this means is that an interdisciplinary education at the programme level should comprise courses laying foundations in transferable competencies alongside explicitly topic-based interdisciplinary courses.

Ironically, what this means is that administrators and designers of a programme may well need to resist a temptation to make all parts of their charge maximally interdisciplinary. Different parts of a programme are needed to serve different roles.

Some parts will be highly interdisciplinary while others will be preparatory and only interdisciplinary within a narrow range. And yet others may be geared towards producing the highly knowledgeable specialists of narrowly focused fields, who we still need in a complex modern society.

Bear in mind, the formal curriculum can only do so much. Beyond that, there are also important lessons to be gleaned from out-of-classroom experiential learning, projects, residential communities, global opportunities. All have their own parts to play in contributing to a modern interdisciplinary progamme.

If we do our jobs as educators and programme designers well, even the specialists should be ready and willing to work together with those from other specialisms, to help understand complex issues or to solve the problems facing humanity.

Loy Hui Chieh is an associate professor and vice-dean of external relations and student life in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at National University of Singapore.

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For more information on this topic, see our spotlight Unpacking academic interdisciplinarity.