I noticed last year (and in the two smaller groups who took the class with me) that the text book, Allen Repko and Rick Shostak's Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies, poses the most challenges to students: many terms and concepts are so foreign to sophomores, juniors, even seniors, that it takes them about five or six chapters just to get their initial confusion sorted out. Six chapters is a long time to be confused!
The problem is not the writing or the information Repko and Shostak present, but the shift in thinking: rather than learning and memorizing material firmly within a single discipline and vocabulary, students are asked to move across boundaries, moving between examples from business, the health fields, communication studies, education, and literature as they try to follow arguments and illustrations about learning and thinking. I think they get whiplash.
Repko and Shostak practice what they preach - in order to be effective interdisciplinarians, students have to develop intellectual dexterity; they need to be able to swiftly move across those boundaries and have at least some familiarity with issues and concepts from many fields. How can I help them gain that dexterity?
The answer, for me, lies in explicitly fostering the metacognition the text book promotes: through a series of introductory slides, I can make the structure of the text book, and the approach of its authors, visible - and allow students to track their own progress through the learning process. Each single slide combines terms and images (hello google image search!) that lay out what we don't know yet - and what we may already know but need to integrate into this new context of interdisciplinarity.
When we talk about the ways academia organizes knowledge into disciplines and thereby creates both social and knowledge-producing communities, codified in departments and housed in different buildings, it is probably helpful to look at a campus map of Coker College: where do the math geeks live, and where do the athletes hang out? what does chemistry research look like, and how does an English student write a research paper? Chances are, my students all recognize this information - but they need to import it into the conversations of the IS200 course and bring it to the forefront of their minds as they plow through the abstract chapter ahead.
Interdisciplinary thinking is about making those connections, but they don't come easy - and traditionally, academia does not do a terrific job fostering that skill. It helps to talk about it, and to discuss the efforts metacognition, thinking about thinking, requires - to talk about what we know, what we don't know yet, and how we create and organize knowledge. And, as usual, making it visual helps with the recognition!