Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching Among College and University Faculty - Brossura

Lattuca, Lisa R.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0826513832 ISBN 13: 9780826513830

Casa editrice: Vanderbilt Univ Pr, 2001

Riassunto

Interdisciplinarity, a favorite buzzword of faculty and administrators, has been appropriated to describe so many academic pursuits that it is virtually meaningless. With a writing style that is accessible, fluid, and engaging, Lisa Lattuca remedies this confusion with an original conceptualization of interdisciplinarity based on interviews with faculty who are engaged in its practice.

Whether exploring the connections between apparently related disciplines, such as English and women's studies, or such seemingly disparate fields as economics and theology, Lattuca moves away from previous definitions based on the degrees of integration across disciplines and instead focuses on the nature of the inquiry behind the work. She organizes her findings around the processes through which faculty pursue interdisciplinarity, the contexts (institutional, departmental, and disciplinary) in which faculty are working, and the ways in which those contexts relate to and affect the interdisciplinary work. Her findings result in useful suggestions for individuals concerned with the meaning of faculty work, the role and impact of disciplines in academe today, and the kinds of issues that should guide the evaluation of faculty scholarship.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Co-author with Joan S. Stark of Shaping the College Curriculum: Academic Plans in Action, Lisa R. Lattuca is assistant professor of higher education in the Department of Leadership, Foundations, and Counseling Psychology at Loyola University, Chicago.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Creating Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching among College and University Faculty

By Lisa R. Lattuca

Vanderbilt University Press

Copyright © 2001 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8265-1383-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii, 
Chapter 1 Considering Interdisciplinarity, 1, 
Chapter 2 Disciplining Knowledge, 23, 
Chapter 3 Profiling Interdisciplinarity, 55, 
Chapter 4 Constructing Interdisciplinarity, 78, 
Chapter 5 Pursuing Interdisciplinarity: Research and Teaching Processes, 119, 
Chapter 6 Abiding Interdisciplinarity: The Impact of Academic Contexts, 168, 
Chapter 7 Tracing Interdisciplinarity: Scholarly Outcomes, 210, 
Chapter 8 Realizing Interdisciplinarity, 243, 
Appendix: Study Design and Conduct, 267, 
Bibliography, 277, 
Index, 289, 

CHAPTER 1

Considering Interdisciplinarity

To the untrained eye the world is interdisciplinary — or, more accurately, nondisciplinary. In Western society our attempts to understand it, however, are often discipline-based. In Cartesian fashion we use our analytic skills to divide the world into smaller and smaller units, hoping that in understanding the parts we will eventually understand the whole. Our colleges and universities, and to a lesser extent our elementary and secondary schools, teach us by word and deed that knowledge is divided into academic disciplines. The more schooling we have, the more entrenched our sense of disciplinarity can become; we are introduced to disciplines in elementary school and learn to live by them in high school and college.

Disciplines provide the rationale for the departmental structure of U.S. colleges and universities and strongly influence faculty appointments; hiring, promotion, and tenure practices; teaching assignments; student recruitment and enrollment; and even accounting practices. Those structural and operational realities link the fortunes of interdisciplinary research and teaching to the disciplines. Moreover, despite increases in interdisciplinary activity in postsecondary education, disciplinary frameworks still organize most faculty members' understandings and interpretations of information and experience. The extent to which this assumption will hold true in the future, of course, is open to debate as more and more faculty question the foundations of the disciplines and seek alternative ways of knowing.

Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, scholars could take for granted the role of academic disciplines in college and university life. Most did not think much about how disciplines influenced the daily work life of college and university faculty and shaped their views of how knowledge is created and advanced. Academic departments that followed disciplinary lines provided a seemingly logical arrangement of scholarly activity. Disciplinary associations served to connect scholars to one another and to advance their given disciplines. Over time, however, it became clear that departments and disciplines had some drawbacks. The exponential growth of knowledge in the twentieth century revealed how disciplinary cultures and perspectives could discourage inquiries and explanations that spanned disciplinary boundaries. Disciplines, it now seems clear, are powerful but constraining ways of knowing. As conceptual frames, they delimit the range of research questions that are asked, the kinds of methods that are used to investigate phenomena, and the types of answers that are considered legitimate (see, for example, Becher 1989, and Kuhn 1970, 1977). Research generally supports this conceptualization, demonstrating close ties among the attitudes, cognitive styles, and behaviors of groups of faculty within disciplines and the character of the knowledge domains in which they work (see Becher 1989; Biglan 1973a, 1973b; Donald 1983, 1990; Jacobson 1981; Lodahl and Gordon 1972; Price 1970; and Shinn, 1982).

As disciplines grow, they also become more complex. Today most disciplines are comprised of smaller communities of scholars who coalesce around shared interests and/or methods of inquiry. In some cases these specializations substantially resemble their parent fields, but as the number and variety of specializations grow, academic specialties can estrange faculty from their colleagues (Becher 1987a). Our nostalgic view of the disciplines is that they are tightly knit communities in which everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Like local parents keeping the neighborhood kids in line, members of the community observe and cement disciplinary norms through conversations across the backyard fence. As the disciplines have grown larger and more diverse, the neighborhood community, however, has been replaced by more distal connections. Scholars in a specialization may have a disciplinary home, but they often travel elsewhere to work. Where once everyone knew all the folks on the block, perhaps even in the town, they now wave from their driveways but rarely invite the neighbors in. The growth of specializations parallels the decline of the front porch from which everyone could survey their territory. Now the more private world of the backyard deck excludes all but a select few.

It is no longer safe to assume that faculty within particular disciplines share areas of interest, methods, or even epistemological perspectives. The field of economics is unusual among disciplines because it enjoys considerable consensus on subject matter and methods. However, in the disciplines of anthropology, art, literature, and sociology, to name a few, there is extraordinary variation in content, methods, and epistemologies. Furthermore the gaps between those who adhere to traditional approaches to knowledge and those who argue that these approaches are misguided and misleading is widening. The qualitative-quantitative cross currents in the social sciences and the increased use of poststructuralist theories in the humanities and social sciences are two obvious examples of how differences in perspectives can disrupt disciplinary relations.

It is difficult to separate the willingness to question conventional disciplinary perspectives from the growth of knowledge in the past century; each drives and is driven, at least in part, by the other. Both developments, however, have moved interdisciplinarity from the academic periphery to a more central scholarly location. The border crossing of early interdisciplinarians was largely instrumental, that is, it was motivated by the need to solve a given problem using borrowed theories, concepts, or methods. Early interdisciplinarians were also fewer in number and generally acted as trespassers, not warring parties; they crossed disciplinary boundaries, but they rarely tried to demolish them. Many of today's interdisciplinary scholars are more revolutionary in their ideas and ideals and are eager to interrupt disciplinary discourse and to challenge traditional notions of knowledge and scholarship. In the sciences and related professional fields, such as engineering and medicine, interdisciplinarity is still largely instrumental. There is also a good deal of instrumental interdisciplinary work in the social sciences and humanities and in professional fields such as education, business, and social work. However, an increasing number of faculty in the humanities and social sciences pursue interdisciplinary work with the intent of deconstructing disciplinary knowledge and boundaries.

In the past when interdisciplinarity was criticized for not being "disciplined," the charge was a presumed lack of rigorous thinking and methodology. Scholars attempting interdisciplinary work were suspected dilettantes who knew too little and claimed too much. This is still the most common, and probably the least demonstrated, criticism of interdisciplinary scholarship. More recently, as interdisciplinarity has become more prevalent in a host of emergent areas, such as cultural studies and women's and ethnic studies, it suffers not only from a reputation for superficiality, but from the unfamiliar and unsettling effects of its ideas. Poststructural and postmodern ideas are often unacceptable to those who support "modern" forms of academic work in the disciplines; traditional disciplinary scholars resist these forms of interdisciplinarity because they find the premises that guide them untenable.

This book began as an attempt to understand interdisciplinary scholarship in all its variety. It grew from my interests in disciplinary influences on faculty work and the desire to understand how individuals negotiate them. I also wanted to understand how and why faculty pursued interdisciplinary projects, how their institutional, departmental, and disciplinary locations affected them and their work, and what kinds of rewards they reaped from interdisciplinary work. I wanted to compare interdisciplinary scholarship and motivations across disciplines and in so doing to learn how they might be similar and different. In the course of studying thirty-eight faculty doing interdisciplinary work across sixteen fields of study and four institutions, it became clear to me that as interdisciplinarity has evolved, it has outgrown its own definitions. The traditional conceptualization of interdisciplinarity as the integration of disciplinary perspectives conceals the disciplinary critique that drives much interdisciplinary scholarship today. This book therefore is as much about the need to revise our definitions of interdisciplinarity as it is about the processes, contexts, and outcomes of interdisciplinary scholarship. It is an attempt to construct a deeper and broader understanding of interdisciplinary work and of the many scholarships that are collected under that rubric.

Interdisciplinary Moves

Some scholars claim interdisciplinarity can be traced to the ancient Greeks, while others dispute these claims. Newell (1998) wondered whether it is meaningful to talk about interdisciplinarity prior to the advent of the disciplines themselves and argued convincingly that "the interdisciplinary motivation to seek a more comprehensive perspective would have little urgency prior to the development of the distinctive worldviews of reductionist disciplines" (p. 533). He suggests that we distinguish between interdisciplinarity and predisciplinarity.

Before the modern disciplines assumed primacy in colleges and universities in the late 1800s, knowledge was categorical: the medieval university divided the seven liberal arts into the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) and the trivium (logic, grammar, and rhetoric). These studies provided the medieval university student with the basis for the study of Aristotle's three philosophies: natural philosophy (what we know as physics), moral philosophy (ethics), and mental philosophy (metaphysics). Changes in the curriculum were slow to materialize. During the first hundred years of higher education in the United States, the college curriculum greatly resembled the classical curriculum of the English college, with its emphasis on rhetoric, ancient languages, and moral philosophy. In the early 1800s critics of this classical curriculum, including many students, pressed educators to include more mathematics and philosophy, as well as the study of literature, history, the natural sciences, and practical fields such as engineering in the college course of study. As student demand grew, advances from science and industry were reflected in the curriculum. Similarly interest in literature, once relegated to the extracurriculum, fueled the growth of the humanities.

As the first academic departments were created at Harvard and the University of Virginia in the 1820s, early reformers such as George Ticknor advocated further expanding the course of study in U.S. colleges and universities by adding elective courses to the curriculum. Expansion, however, was not easily accomplished, and traditions in the classical college held fast. In 1825, when a small group of instructors at Yale suggested that Greek and Latin should be eliminated from the required curriculum so that other subjects could be added, the Connecticut legislature supported them by issuing a report claiming that Yale's curriculum was impractical and regressive. The response from the Yale Corporation, led by President Jeremiah Day, successfully defended the classical course of study and deflected extensive reform until mid- century. Institutions that wished to provide instruction in areas of study that could not be incorporated into the standard curriculum established parallel courses of study and separate schools. Student demand for education in the emerging "scientific" disciplines, the impact of Jacksonian democracy, and concerns about the U.S. economy eventually convinced educators and legislators that the country needed instruction in more practical subjects. The Morrill Act of 1862 promoted the development of a utilitarian mission that emphasized postsecondary education that would enable citizens to participate in the economic and commercial life of the country. Colleges and universities could now serve the needs of their regional populations, providing access to specialized training in professions such as nursing, education, and engineering.

The history of U.S. higher education since the nineteenth century has been one of increasing disciplinary specialization and organization. Interdisciplinarity as we know it today was not on the minds of higher education administrators, faculty, and students who were engaged in the heady process of building disciplines and forging new professional fields. In time concerns about the proliferation of academic specialties prompted some educators to think about the problems associated with the disciplinary structure of colleges and universities and about developing coherent and integrated courses of study for students. The seeds of interdisciplinarity then began a long and slow process of germination.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the social, political, and economic upheaval of the Civil War years and the increasing belief in the practical benefits of science had helped transform a number of classical colleges into research universities. Aspiring to be a comprehensive source of knowledge, the emerging research university sought to provide instruction in a range of subjects and left selection issues to individual students and faculty. Although academic departments were established in the 1820s, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that faculty and administrators began to worry in earnest about the fragmentation that might accompany disciplinary divisions. Eventually, great increases in the number of courses and new concentrations raised concerns about haphazard course selection and overspecialization by students. University reformers of this era argued that the university had failed in its mission to shape college graduates into models of humanity and intelligence. Curricular reform was needed to restore unity and moral character in undergraduates. Despite such pressures to return to their religious character and mission, most universities skirted the issue of moral development in favor of simply adding more structure to the undergraduate curriculum (Reuben 1996). Calls for intellectual unity were met by restricting the number of electives a student could take. Knowledge, many conceded, had become too far-reaching for the individual to master. Although the distribution and concentration requirements appeased reformers by encouraging more directed study among students, these structures did not reinstitute a unified view of knowledge.

Rudolph (1977) contends that for U.S. higher education in the decades between the Civil War and World War I, "the elective system was something of a safety valve. No comparable device could have contained the energies that were seeking expression in the undergraduate curriculum" (p. 191). The elective system allowed universities to respond to the advances in occupational training and in technology, to the professionalization of the disciplines, of scholarship, and of scientific research, and even to a population of older and more serious students who now entered college after attending high schools with standardized curricula.

By the 1900s rumblings of discontent with the disarray of the undergraduate curriculum were heard in colleges and universities and colleges and universities moved again toward general education requirements. Although colleges and universities tried for some time to add structure to the elective system, it was the general education movement that shaped higher education in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Efforts to define a common curriculum hastened during and after World War I as many felt the need to preserve and strengthen a sense of cultural and national identity and responsible citizenship. After the war comprehensive survey courses emphasized the content and values of Western civilization. The need for instructors who could effectively synthesize knowledge and make it accessible to undergraduates contrasted with the kind of scholarship promoted by specialization and scientific methods. Despite concerns about disciplinary fragmentation and despite the focus on the dangers of academic specialization, few innovators considered interdisciplinary curricula, a term virtually no one used. The Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin, which lasted only from 1928 to 1932, is perhaps the most famous exception. The concept of "interdisciplinarity" is more likely attributable to research rather than teaching activities.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Creating Interdisciplinarity by Lisa R. Lattuca. Copyright © 2001 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Vanderbilt Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0826513832
• ISBN 13: 9780826513830
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 296
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile