Bret Weber, Department of Social Work, University of North Dakota
Bret has a Ph.D. in history and has taught in departments of History both at UND and elsewhere; he also has a M.S.W. and currently is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work.
Interdisciplinary teaching proposes to help students apply and transfer knowledge, methods, and skills from supposedly distinct fields of study. One implied benefit is that this helps translate knowledge across the university, as well as from the classroom to lives and jobs beyond the academy. It is a popular concept that university leaders encourage in their rhetoric, though entrenched structures that grew up with educational institutions provide a formidable blockade that prevents most of us with even half an interest from actually doing it.
Some of the obvious problems include the fact that disciplines often have their own unique jargon for broad concepts. There are also various professional biases, egos, and inferiority complexes. Interdisciplinary efforts are also made problematic by administrative aspects including different semester schedules, accountability standards, and even arcane matters of scheduling and teacher deployment that vary not only from department to department, but also from college to college.
Additional distinctions may be less obvious until one actually takes the full plunge and moves from one discipline to the other. Regardless of credentials, training, and experience, there may be a nagging tendency to view the ‘newcomer’ as an outsider and to question the legitimacy of the boundary crosser. Similarly, there may be different attitudes regarding the balance between teaching, scholarship, and service, and there may even be strikingly different definitions or views of what these things mean. For instance, disciplines value books and journal articles according to their own calculus, and service may mean obligation to dull department meetings in one discipline and broad ethical commitments to social justice in another.
There are also dramatic differences in terms of the student populations. These might be gender-based: some disciplines have a fairly even mix where others may be dominated by a single gender. There is also a difference in terms of how the students come to the classroom: Professional programs tend toward cohort models, and when students ‘travel’ as a group they may develop cliques, anxieties, and distinct cultures that affect the classroom in ways that are more dynamic than in a classroom in which most of the students and the instructor are meeting for the first time at the beginning of the semester.
On balance, however, I believe the journey so far contains more rewards than perils. I have found interdisciplinary teaching to be especially beneficial in bridging the approaches of more traditional academic studies and professional programs. In those cases, the ‘real-world’ focus of ‘applied’ studies helps students to understand the practical potential of their university courses. On the flip side, the academic approach brings an intellectual rigor to applied studies that pushes students beyond simply “jumping through the hoops.”
Teaching Thursdays 
Thanks for sharing your musing, Bret. I enjoyed reading your thoughts (which reminded me of a passage of Charles Darwin’s ‘Autobiography’, the part where he rigorously weighs the pros and cons of entering into marriage). 😉
Last month I had the privilege of spending some time pondering the insightful musings of Mark Taylor, professor of religion and author of the publication ‘Field Notes from Elsewhere’ (Columbia University Press, 2009). A former Integrated Studies student insisted that I read Taylor’s book, and so I was persuaded to set aside some time to honor that request. I found the book to be existentially rewarding mostly because of Taylor’s occasional meditations on hard lessons learned after 40 years of college teaching. I introduce Mark Taylor here because I want to bring one of his thoughts to this discussion on interdisciplinary teaching.
Taylor writes, “One of the greatest challenges of teaching is to convey the complexity of simplicity and the simplicity of complexity in a way that is accurate but understandable. Too many students want clear answers, and readers all too often look for quick fixes and simple solutions. But not everything can be boiled down to basics; there are no twelve-step programs for life’s most pressing problems. For explanations and examples to be effective, they can be neither too simple nor too complex, neither too concrete nor too abstract, The real, I believe, is not found on one or the other side of any divide but always lies in between. Learning this lesson is never easy–it requires time and patience. If teaching and writing are to trace the fine line of life, they must follow the elusive boundary where things simultaneously come together and fall apart–like chapters of a book that are not fragments yet do not add up to a whole” (Taylor, 199).
The barriers to interdisciplinary teaching are due to the institution of higher education itself. Departments and faculty are operating at capacity, and naturally departments want to cover their required courses and serve their majors and minors. Therefore, faculty who want to teach interdisciplinary courses or seminars cannot get the necessary release time. At UND this has been a problem for the Honors Program, for Integrated Studies, and for Interdisciplinary Studies. Last semester I visited the University of Alberta in Edmonton and got a good look at their (much bigger) Interdisciplinary Studies unit. They had similar problems. Here and there UND faculty find ways to sometimes teach an interdisciplinary (or trans-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary or cross disciplinary) course, usually as an (often uncompensated) overload. So what will it take to make interdisciplinary teaching a reality? A major shift in values in higher education? (By the way, I do value disciplinary teaching also–one of the arguments for the traditional disciplines is the claim that these disciplines reflect cognitive domains). –Burt Thorp, Interdisciplinary Studies
Burt,
Thanks for the comment! One thing that I’ve thought about more and more is how much interdisciplinary teaching takes place within existing departments. In other words, there is a growing group of people like Bret who do not see the department as defining or defined by a discipline. My suspicion is that this will happen more and more on university campuses and, in some ways, undermine the old departmental system in general. This is particularly true for those of us who study the ancient world. It’s natural to include and critique archaeological, philological, historical, and linguistic research in our efforts to understand the ancient world.
Of course a shift like this within disciplines will likely have negative consequences for programs like Interdisciplinary Studies which defines itself as a program (or a department in some places) that is distinct because it is interdisciplinary.
Keep an eye on Teaching Thursday over the next few weeks as we see more similar contributions.
Bill
There is a tension between the demands of specialization in disciplines and the desire to teach across disciplines. The amount of time an academic has to spend mastering an area of specialization means that forays outside that area risk being shallow. A graduate school professor of mine, a historian of religions from Germany (a very traditional German academic) once told us in a seminar that no scholar could know more than two religions! I recall bristling at that; that professor’s view rejects the idea that there is any place for generalists in scholarship, for someone who tried to take a broader view of a subject. I understood where he was coming from, though; a classicist one told me that one could spend a lifetime just working on Homer. Another question: when scholars in a department try to teach outside their discipline, how might they defend themselves from the criticism that they are poaching on another discipline’s territory (without having the usual initiation into that second discipline, through degrees and graduate work and so forth)?
Burt,
Thanks for the follow up comment. I think most concerns about poaching classes, stepping on disciplinary toes, and the like are displaced concerns about the future of the kind of limited and focused perspective that most disciplinary specialists offer.
I wonder if those of us who do interdisciplinary work sometimes misplace our worries. The future seems far more likely to be interdisciplinary than rooted in traditional disciplinary practices. In fact, critics of the modern university often single out the limited scope of disciplinary practices for derision. Moreover, administrators often see the limited scope and appear of many traditional disciplinary foci to be an inefficient model for undergraduate teaching. From my perspective, at least, smaller more nimble faculties can offer greater scope albeit at the expense of depth. Inter/transdisciplinary researchers find themselves with multiple pools of resources at their disposal as they can flit from field to field following the fickle flow of resources. Finally, one has to expect that transdisciplinary scholars will have an advantage in moving into administrative positions. The ability to understand efficiently the way in which disciplines relate to and depend upon one another is an important asset in administrative positions which are all, to some extent, interdisciplinary in scope.
This all being said, I think that it is important for us as inter/transdiciplinary folks to realize that the decline of traditional disciplinary specialization is not necessary a good thing. As a sometime dabbler in the interdisciplinary discourses of Classics, I can really appreciate just how much my field has depend upon high quality disciplinary work in philology, archaeology, epigraphy, and many other focused, careful, and disciplined, disciplinary practices.
The worry that I have, then, is not that transdisciplinary scholarship and teaching will be pushed to the margins, but that disciplinary work upon which it depends will be pushed to the side. After all, it’s appealing to see trans- and interdisciplinary scholarship as exciting, innovative, and able to move in leaps and bounds whereas old, stodgy, limited disciplinary work (as the popular perception) dwells on minutia, quibbles over insignificant details, and is mired in longstanding debates that appear far removed from pressing, contemporary concerns. The former appears, in this common formulation, and the latter as so much ivory-tower irrelevance. But as we both know the ivory-tower business is what allows those of us who dance around disciplines with wild and passionate abandon to make leaps, stay agile, and influence the future direction of the university.
The disciplines, I think, are ours to preserve.
Bill