Breaking Project Based Learning And The Concept Of Academic Disciplines

I’m going to talk about how project based learning actually presents us with an interesting problem post-high school, but to tell you about that, first I have to tell you about this a word that comes from the MIT Media Lab: antidisciplinary.

The director of the Media Lab, Joi Ito, has a rough definition of the word:

An antidisciplinary project isn’t a sum of a bunch of disciplines but something entirely new — the word defies easy definition.

But, seeing as how “the word defies definition”, maybe it’d be easier to explain what the ethos of antidisciplinary education means in the context of the educational journey. The Media Lab has written about how they’ve struggled to explain and entice students of color to their graduate program. While this is the culmination of a lot of issues, I think one of the biggest issues here is that it’s unclear what anti disciplinary research even looks like, from an educational standpoint. So, for context, let’s take a look at the journey of a young woman of color and see why, from traditional educational frameworks, she’d be right to be confused, even scoff at, the opportunity antidisciplinary work presents her.

This young woman takes the traditional route, she goes to school, she works through K — 12, shines as a star, and attends an exceptional undergraduate program. The entire time, she has been socialized to be perfect, and to all outside extents, maybe she has been, maybe she’s gotten a 4.0, or a 5.0, all her life. Throughout this journey, she is socialized to believe that math is math and can be applied to other fields. She is told art is a field fundamentally different from science and that the task of merging them means working in an entirely new framework, in an interdisciplinary approach. So, when she first hears of the term, she reacts strangely to it. She understands that, in an academic institution, research builds upon expertise, and that if she wants to be an expert in her field, antidisciplinary approaches are great for side projects, for outside work, but that research is research, something constrained to a specific discipline, with proven results using a specific methodology to arrive at a specific solution, or if the problem doesn’t require a solution, then the answer must fit a certain framework (think, the ways of knowing that are codified in Philosophy, or Africana studies, or American Studies). Or, maybe she doesn’t want to be an academic, maybe this young woman of color wants to be a marketing professional, maybe she’ll be innovative because, in her academic excellence, she has studied both design and psychology, she sees an interdisciplinary pathway! I think this is where the distinction between interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary becomes concrete: in an interdisciplinary world, an interest in both these fields translates into one narrow field: marketing. In an antidisciplinary, project based approach an interest in these fields means working on projects that involve both these things, it means interrogating the intersection of design and psychology until there’s a question that can be firmly answered.

What would a world look like that understood tackling antidisciplinary problems as a matter of education? Well, for starters, it would be a world that emphasized project based learning rather than assessment based. It would build frameworks of knowing, classes of problems, and probably understand the connections between solutions to these problems. A project based learning pedagogy, from kindergarten through the graduate or professional world, would yield a way of understanding practical solutions as a combination of skills and approaches. The fundamental difference is that when a student only has interdisciplinary learning as their options for breaking or crossing disciplines, they see the world as two categories of problems: those academia is suited to solve, and those academica needs to be bent, crossed, and manipulated to understand and build solutions to.

Now, don’t get me wrong, in my view (I don’t know what Joi Ito, or the Media Lab for that matter, thinks) antidisciplinary learning isn’t against disciplines (no matter what the name may imply): there’s great merit to theoretical math, or biology research that only observes biological methods. This is called basic science, or fundamental research, and it is the process that has built many of our most interesting fields. No, there’s basic, groundbreaking work to be done within disciplines, and I’ll readily acknowledge that they might hold merit for as long as we decide academic institutions hold merit. But, if we’re going to get work done in project based learning, and have more for students to do in the end than just siloing away their efforts into a specific field, we need to establish and understand and cultivate disciplinary and antidisciplinary learning. Project based learning gives us a world of opportunity, of making education relevant to kids again — can’t we extend this thinking to the college, graduate, and research level too? I believe the answer is antidisciplinary learning, and I think the language of breaking academic disciplines has a lot teach us.

— Andres Cuervo

Originally published at cwervo.com.