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.