Definitions
Interdisciplinarity Studies:
"Address a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession … Draw on different disciplinary perspectives … and Integrate their insights through construction of a more comprehensive perspective" Klein and Newell (Handbook of the Undergraduate Curriculum, 1997)
Defining Interdisciplinary Course Structures
The term “interdisciplinary” is quite often misunderstood or is taken as some very large and very vague idea. Courses that are often thought of as interdisciplinary are sometimes multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary or adisciplinary. Below is an effort to distinguish between these structures. I have borrowed Carolyn Haynes’ metaphor of ice cream, which, like these structures, is just basically good—but it comes in many varieties that produce very different results.
Multidisciplinary
Courses present disciplinary perspectives in a serial fashion, like Neapolitan ice cream. The flavors/discipline contents are lined up next to each other but don’t intersect. While this is an interesting approach, it leaves the responsibility of integrating the knowledge up to the students.
Cross-Disciplinary
Courses are courses in which one disciplinary perspective dominates the other(s), like chocolate chip ice cream, where the dominant flavor is vanilla but with flavorful little chunks sprinkled throughout. While courses can be intentionally designed to be cross-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary can also be an accidental result if the class is taught by one person, or if one discipline’s “way of knowing” is the focus with nuggets of a second (or third or fourth) discipline’s content scattered across the material.
Adisciplinary
courses attempt to gain a holistic picture without specific attention to disciplines. A course like this generally starts with an idea and the approaches pop up where they may, like tutti-frutti. This is an interesting idea, but it can leave students (and faculty) feeling insecure and without direction. Because there is not a conscious effort to integrate types of knowledge, interdisciplinarity is generally missing.
Interdisciplinary
Courses work toward conscious integration of insights from disciplines. The result is like marble ice cream, where both flavors/disciplines remain distinct and equal, but the result is a distinctly new flavor/experience. This handout addresses only interdisciplinary courses.
Course Development Strategies
- Identify pertinent disciplines and assemble a team.
- Try to ensure equal participation among members.
- Develop a topic; consider how to balance breadth and depth.
- Unlike discipline curricula that depend on individual classes providing discrete chunks of knowledge that a student uses to build on from one year to the next, interdisciplinary courses are worlds unto themselves. That is one reason why focus is so very important. Do not try to cover a huge topic; instead, focus on one part of the topic or one part of a problem. Some interdisciplinary courses have been built on a single statement. For instance, one course (syllabus available on the AIS website) used a statement, made in an article that was assigned as the first reading, that the problems present in the Middle East today are directly linked to the Crusad