What Teachers Would Like to Know About Interdisciplinary Learning
Part 1: Definitions
So yet another university in Singapore has announced the move toward interdisciplinary learning.
These are exciting times for students, staff, and faculty. However, as a member of the faculty, I think these are also confusing times, in part because the universities seem to use ‘interdisciplinary’ and its related terms loosely.
The uses of the word ‘interdisciplinary’
One can find the term ‘interdisciplinary’ used in various distinct situations within vastly different eras of history.
Looking at a corpus showing how this word was used over the years just in America, back in 1990, ‘interdisciplinary’ described how some teams functioned at work - social workers, and medical researchers for instance. That is to say, it was a word that was more relevant to jobs, not to formal school learning. Fast forward to 2012, and the same corpus displays overwhelmingly more connections between ‘interdisciplinary’ and school-related words like ‘university’, ‘studies’, and ‘education’.
So what exactly does ‘interdisciplinary’ mean? How does it differ from the other words sometimes used as its substitutes: multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and trans-disciplinary? In the news reports about NTU and NUS’s inter-disciplinary yearnings, those terms are not defined. They are, however, bandied around rather skillfully with some sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Defining the terms
I take that back — I wish they would signify nothing. It would be easier to process the information if those terms signified nothing. Unfortunately, they mean so many things, it requires some close-reading (plus a dictionary and a Google search) to understand what will or could be happening in our two biggest universities next year.
Let’s first try to define these forms of disciplinary activities — multi-, inter-, trans- and cross-, bearing in mind that definitions of words change over time.
In multi-disciplinary activities, boundaries between disciplines are not crossed (Choi and Pak, 2007). A scientist, an artist, an engineer and a musician could work on a project, lend their expertise and knowledge to solve a problem in a team, for example. Problem solved, no new body of knowledge created.
In inter-disciplinary activities, the disciplines tend to belong to the same umbrella category, physics, biology, and chemistry, for instance. Boundaries between disciplines are crossed. Nanotechnology, for example, is a new body of knowledge that was generated as a result of a unique way of integrating physics, chemistry, and biology.
However, throw engineering and fashion design (both are not in the ‘science’ category) into the above mix — that’s how Black Panther got his suit made — and you’ll have a branch of nanotechnology that is characterised by cross-disciplinary research activities.
Trans-disciplinary activities transcend academic and work realms. The bodies of knowledge from each of the participatory disciplines are blended to form new methods and practices (Brodin and Avery, 2020). A trans-disciplinary activity is usually values-centred and firmly situated in the present, its participants varied and diverse (McGregor, 2004). As Jaya Ramchandani explains, “The research paradigms involve non-academic participants as (equal) participants in the process to reach a common goal — usually a solution to a problem of society at large”. In short, trans-disciplinary activities are like a cross-disciplinary club with a social justice goal. The main membership criteria is the interest in the club’s cause.
Interestingly, this definition of ‘trans-disciplinary’ suggests that our universities’ main curricula may be, as usual, a little slow to catch up to the real world. Inter-disciplinary learning is so 2000s, trans-disciplinary learning is now.
Education doesn’t have to be about the ‘new and improved’, ‘cutting-edge’ or ‘state-of-the-art’. Good pedagogy, like focus on questioning, challenging assumptions and reflection has managed to survive through the ages, from biblical, Old Testament times to Socrates and through to yes, even the European industrial ages.
NTU and NUS though, are universities that care about world rankings and want to be seen as leaders in higher education. It’s great that they are moving towards inter-disciplinary learning, but my evaluation would be ‘it’s about time’ rather than ‘this is a relevant move’.
The Sound and the Fury
Delayed reactions of our universities aside, let’s focus on what these universities reportedly want to do, with the above definitions in mind.
When the Straits Times reported on NUS and NTUs’s new iteration of education, the term ‘interdisciplinary’ was used the most. However, the quotes in the news reports point to more than interdisciplinary learning.
For example, one of NUS’s goals is to provide ‘“greater flexibility and the cross-pollination of disciplines” across the humanities, social sciences, science and mathematics’. If you thought, hey, that is cross-disciplinary learning, you’d be right since inter-disciplinary learning takes places within related disciplines.
In the new integrated College of Humanities and Sciences, NUS students are anticipated to ‘benefit greatly from the multiple and integrated perspectives’ — don’t let the word ‘multiple’ distract you! Multidisciplinary learning tends towards non-integration, so either cross-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary learning is more likely to happen.
Further west in Singapore, the new core curriculum of NTU seems to approach trans-disciplinary learning as its president imagines students to contribute towards the good of society. ‘[T]hey should be able to appreciate the ethical dimensions of writing code…or the importance of intuitive and aesthetic design in the engineering of a new healthcare device’, he says. However, these activities appear to be located in the idea of ‘work’ and so are likely to be part of cross-disciplinary learning.
There appears to be a multi-disciplinary slant to NTU lessons as well, since, ‘[t]o develop their abilities to work in multidisciplinary teams, students from different disciplines will learn together in the same classroom’. So, despite the term ‘interdisciplinary’ being used to summarise the new shift in learning, NTU seems to be bringing in multidisciplinary elements as well.
If these two Singapore universities sound confused, they are not the only ones. Around the world, institutions and schools are doing the same thing, likely because the ideas of inter-, multi-, cross- and trans-, disciplinary learning are still relatively young. Additionally, the confusion is compounded by how fashionable these words are and how easily they circulate and take on a life of their own in each educational context.
The (in)significance of buzzwords
Interdisciplinary has been a buzzword in education for some time, together with ‘critical thinking’ and ‘creativity’. This trendy trinity of buzzwords gesture in the right direction. However, that direction is a very general one, sort of like telling someone, “Head north”, and sweeping your arm in a 180 degrees motion.
A buzzword is just that — a word. It doesn’t help teachers teach. What we require to do our jobs well can be distilled into three points: what to teach, how to teach and how to assess learning.
Ask 100 teachers what to teach in an interdisciplinary course, and you’ll get 100 different ideas for lesson content and a hundred different teaching methods as well. And those same teachers would then give you — yes, you guessed it — 100 different ways to assess an interdisciplinary assignment.
If interdisciplinary learning is really that important, it cannot remain a buzzword. Its definition has to be clarified and refined for each specific educational context, so that faculty can be more intentional, focused and autonomous in choosing what to teach.
In my next two articles, I’ll be discussing the issue of training teachers to teach in ‘inter- / multi- / cross- / trans-disciplinary learning’ contexts, and the even thornier topic of assessment in those contexts.
References
Brodin, E.M. & Avery, H. (2020) Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration and Scholarly Independence in Multidisciplinary Learning Environments at Doctoral Level and Beyond. Minerva 58, 409–433. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-020-09397-3
Choi, B. C., & Pak, A. W. (2006). Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in health research, services, education and policy: 1. Definitions, objectives, and evidence of effectiveness. Clinical and investigative medicine. Medecine clinique et experimentale, 29(6), 351–364.
Shen, J., Sung, S., & Zhang, D. (2015). Toward an Analytic Framework of Interdisciplinary Reasoning and Communication (IRC) Processes in Science. International Journal of Science Education, 37(17), 2809–2835. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2015.1106026
Jensenius, A.R. (2012). Disciplinarities: intra, cross, multi, inter, trans. Available at: https://www.arj.no/2012/03/12/disciplinarities-2/ (Accessed 29 September 2020)
McGregor, S. L. T. (2004) The Nature of Transdisciplinary Research and Practice. Available at: http://www.kon.org/hswp/archive/transdiscipl.pdf (Accessed 29 September 2020).
Ramchandani, J. (2017). What is transdisciplinary? Available at: https://medium.com/we-learn-we-grow/what-is-transdisciplinary-13c16eacf57d (Accessed 29 September 2020)
