Zooming in on Interdisciplinary Education
An experiment in teaching social science
I’ve started a new appointment as associate provost of undergraduate education at the National University of Singapore (NUS). It is an immense privilege to join the Provost and team to advance groundbreaking interdisciplinary education and top-notched higher learning. It is a new journey for me since I left politics a year ago. I’ll journal my journey here, in the hope that we can share our thoughts to learn from each other.
Other than the missions that are assigned to me as associate provost, I’m leading a team of nine educators to design and teach the integrated social science module for the College of Humanities and Sciences (CHS). CHS brings together the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) to offer interdisciplinary education to over 2,000 undergraduates enrolling each year. Students have to take 13 modules in the CHS core curriculum. Our module, HSS1000 Understanding Social Complexity, is one of the three integrated modules from FASS. The other two are HSA1000 Asian Interconnections and HSH1000 The Human Condition.
I got involved in the planning and designing of HSS1000 last year. A group of five faculty members from Economics, Geography, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology constituted a committee to do this. We proposed two models. Model A would teach social science as a rigorous and unified system of knowledge production, while Model B would teach interdisciplinary integration of the social sciences as an ongoing endeavor involving the individual disciplines connecting to each other to shed light on common problems.
After consultations with the heads of departments, it was decided that a hybrid model emphasizing both rigor in knowledge production and the ongoing process of interdisciplinary integration would be taught. Therein lies our central tension and a productive one. We sought to combine both in a team-taught split-theme syllabus. The NUS semester has 13 teaching weeks. After the introductory lecture, we will run two lecture series, one on the development theme and another on the freedom theme, before concluding with two lectures on applications of social scientific knowledge. The rigor part will be to emphasize the five principles of the social science method throughout the 13 lectures.
Why are we focusing on the development theme and freedom theme? In part, this was become these were two themes on which the lecturers could find interdisciplinary connections. Georgios and I, an economist and a sociologist, are taking development. He will be giving an interesting lecture on meritocracy, while I will give two lectures on the political economy of development, with Georgios chipping in on who benefits and loses from trade. We want to maximize the interdisciplinary conversations and connections, so Rebecca, a political scientist, will give a lecture on science and technology. Professor Brenda Yeoh, a distinguished geographer, will give a special guest webinar on migration. That webinar will have Georgios and Elaine, also a political scientist, as discussants before opening the floor to Q&A from the students.
Nina, a psychologist, will headline the freedom lecture series, with Elaine and Rebecca each giving a lecture on democracy, freedom and security, and the international system and the use of force. Professor Audrey Yue, a distinguished cultural studies scholar from Communications and New Media, will cap the series with a special webinar on multiculturalism, and Rebecca and Nina will be her discussants. Nina will also be experimenting with a more interactive lecture format that involves interdisciplinary conversations, with Georgios and I taking part in her lectures on the social construction of freedom and the moral psychology of crime and deviance.
The penultimate lecture will have Dr Alicia Pon from Social Work give a special webinar on social inequality in Singapore, with our young Teaching Assistants from diverse disciplines forming the panel of discussants. The final lecture will end the module on a reflective note, with Nina chairing the panel of the five lecturers to discuss the future and the contribution of social science to the “hinge of history” issues affecting humanity, from the climate emergency to disruptive new technologies.
With HSS1000, we are zooming in on interdisciplinary education. There are many layered meanings here. Technically we are enabled by the Zoom webinar technology to teach close to 1,200 students in the coming semester, something that we cannot do even in non-pandemic times, because we don’t have a lecture stadium! Zoom allows us to get up close and personal to so many students, instead of them looking down on that tiny stick figure gesturing on stage.
More importantly, the technology allows us to be flexible in configuring the interdisciplinary connections and conversations we want to present to students. We will teach interdisciplinary connections, which we from diverse disciplines have been discovering in this journey of designing this module. This is an important point, I have become, and from what I have gathered from Elaine, Georgios, Nina and Rebecca, my fellow sojourners, we have become more interdisciplinary ourselves as a result of planning for this module. We are experiencing interdisciplinary education ourselves.
And we will become more so in the course of lecturing, which is why we will also stage interdisciplinary conversations to teach ourselves further and draw in our students to learn by seeing their professors discussing and debating with each other.
I’ve taught undergraduates for over 20 years now and I’ve never been more excited about teaching a module than this one. HSS1000 is an experiment in interdisciplinary education that will also teach the lecturers and proposes to transform them to become more interdisciplinary. We are both the experimenters and the test subjects.
The experiment starts next week.
