Disciplinarity, Multidisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity - You're Probably Doing It!

Three terms your spell check is troubled by, disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity, in fact are very common in academia - studying and teaching we encounter them every day. When we talk about General Education, we are considering strategies to encourage students to look beyond the single discipline of a field or a major - that single-field disciplinarity, which often yields a lot of deep knowledge within a specific area, can feel a little limiting when it comes to discovering contexts or solving problems.

In illustrating the limits of disciplinarity, academia has been talking about silos, huge storage units that keep everything properly contained. I am not a fan of that word, because it seems to disparage the disciplinary approach. But I did want to include the image to show how silos occur in academia. I promise, these silos contain much important knowledge! Very useful and exciting knowledge! And they are often very good at what they do.

In a General Education curriculum we expect students to take courses across several fields, but perhaps grouped around a single theme. For example, music, literature and history may all address a subject such as the African-American experience of the early 20th century. We could study all three fields and learn about jazz and blues, the poems of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and read W. E. B. Du Bois and Henry Louis Gates Jr. sequentially across three courses, and this multidisciplinary approach would create a broader understanding than a single-track approach might.

But what if we would like to know how our perception of history is shaped by the writings of Langston Hughes? If we are interested in the ways jazz music traveled north along some very specific routes during the Great Migration? How both jazz music and poetry can create personal experiences of history? Or if we want to find the beats and cadences of the blues in Sterling Brown's "Southern Road," and we would like to know more about the conditions of prison labor? When we begin to dig into these intersections and connections, we are practicing interdisciplinarity.

Each of these approaches has a place in academia - there will always be some of us who are excited by a pure science or a field of research that is clearly delineated. And there are some of us who like to look at something from different perspectives to understand it better. But some of us really like to look at the in-between, the both, or even the everything. It's all just fine, as long as we know what we are doing.

Monkey Appetite and Cave Music: TEDx Talks about crossing boundaries

Interdisciplinary studies is an academic field - but it is only useful as it reflects and relates to how professionals in the Real World approach their work: any problem they are trying to solve usually involves several angles, and the more tools you have in your toolbox, the more open you are to drawing on other fields and insights, the more likely you are to be successful.

This first TEDx talk is by a woman who works in cartography, or map making, and who starts out her presentation with the "monkey appetite" - the habit of reaching for everything that looks interesting, or for exploring all kinds of things. This researcher involves many different sciences to advance her research in maps as she gathers and understands data. You kind of have to hang in there when she talks about eye tracking and the brain, but I think even a non-scientist can appreciate the curiosity that drives this speaker’s own research across multiple boundaries.

This next speaker is for the seriously curious: He offers an account of the founding of the interdisciplinary field of acoustic archaeology (yes, sounds and caves!), which combines music, electrical engineering, and archaeology. He emphasizes the importance of collaboration and community-building across disciplines in order to create innovation. The talk introduces the concepts of interdisciplinarity: diversity, community size, dynamic participants, agents of connection, and respect for all fields. I also like the graphics!

That's it for today. One final thought: I particularly like how these two speakers promote curiosity. So often, we are told not to overthink, or to stay within the boundaries of some assignment, or to keep a focus on a specific question - but sometimes the really good stuff, the innovation, the problem solving, come when we push  those boundaries and follow instinct, or serendipity, or just the "monkey appetite."

...now vee may perhaps to begin?

You have to start somewhere - you can start with a definition, I suppose, and most of us start with the definition offered by google. It does not yield much! I demonstrate this to students in my Modern Fiction course, who are supposed to find a definition for "modernity" - and are being told that "modernity relates to being modern," which is not helpful, as we then all see.
But yes, "interdisciplinary" relates to multiple branches of knowledge, or disciplines - we may perhaps already wonder how knowledge is organized. And why! Education provides a lot of examples of such organization: courses, exams, text books, majors and minors, standards. Organization helps render an unbelievable amount of information manageable - we feel like we have mastered some part of a whole when we have read a chapter, passed an exam, earned a degree. Knowledge is framed, focused. On the other hand, those frames are somewhat arbitrary - and sometimes connections and relationships are cut off, in order to simplify what we look at.
Interdisciplinary studies allows for some of those connections and relationships to be added back in, to allow us to look at different contexts and intersections.