INTERDISCIPLINARITY
We live in a society that prizes depth in a single discipline over breadth in multiple areas. Innovation, however, demands that we see the world through multiple lenses at the same time, and draw meaning from seemingly disparate information.Interdisciplinarity engages teachers and students in connecting and integrating several academic schools of thought, professions, or technologies in the pursuit of a common task. An interdisciplinary community or project is made up of people from multiple disciplines and professions who are engaged in creating and applying new knowledge as they work together as equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. They approach a problem from various angles and methods, considering diverse and even contradictory points of view, eventually cutting across disciplines and forming a new method for understanding the subject.
Cultivating interdisciplinarity as a habit of mind is essential to the education of informed and engaged citizens and leaders capable of analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information from multiple sources in order to render reasoned decisions. Interdisciplinarity requires that those involved have interactional expertise to improve their efficiency working across multiple disciplines as well as within the new interdisciplinary area.
Integrative education cuts across subject-matter lines, bringing together various aspects of the curriculum into meaningful association to focus upon broad areas of study. It reflects the interdependent real world, and involves the learner's body, thoughts, feelings, senses, and intuition in learning experiences that unify knowledge and provide a greater understanding than that which could be obtained by examining the parts separately.
Shoemaker, Betty Jean Eklund. "Integrative Education. A Curriculum for the Twenty-First Century". Oregon School Study Council, 1989
Integrative education bases its practices on the characteristics of the human learner and on the interdependent nature of reality. Instead of artificially dividing the world into "subjects" and using textbooks and seatwork, integrative education immerses students in an enriched environment that reflects the complexities of life. This provides a holistic context for learning that leads to a greater ability to make and remember connections and to solve problems.Susan Kovalik and Karen Olsen. ITI: The Model. Integrated Thematic Instruction.
Washington Kent: Books for Educators, 1993
No less important than creativity and innovation, the ability to deal easily with ideas will be far more important for far more students than ever before, not least because a firm grasp of the main ideas and concepts from a variety of disciplines is the best asset one could have for learning new things quickly. Much more of the work of the future will be dealing with abstractions than has been true in the past. But is also true that creativity often springs from combining ideas from many different fields. Curricula that cut across the disciplines are most likely to foster creativity, but they will produce little of value unless the students have a firm grasp of the central ideas and concepts in the underlying disciplines, because these ideas and concepts provide the framework on which new knowledge can be hung.National Center on Education and the Economy, Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New
Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, Revised and Expanded. Jossey-Bass, 2008
Lessons that span multiple subject areas will familiarize students with the concepts of linking otherwise separate concepts or disciplines to discover new ideas at the intersection of fields. Especially in the upper grades, having students work in teams where diverse talents, interests, and thinking styles are represented will offer practice in the group dynamics that lead to organizational innovation.Karlyn Adams, The Sources of Innovation and Creativity. National Center on Education and the Economy, 2005
Creative successes and chances to innovate best occur at the intersection – a place where wildly different ideas bump into each other and build upon each other. Not only do we have a greater chance of finding remarkable idea combinations there, we also find many more of them. Breaking down associative barriers is fundamental to reaching the intersection.Associative barriers are the limits we cluster around a concept in order to categorize and structure the stimuli in our environment. Building such barriers is the mind’s way of creating order in a chaotic world. Researchers suspect that these barriers are responsible for inhibiting creativity. People with low associative barriers can make unusual connections that may eventually lead to successful creativity. These include individuals who have been exposed to various cultures, that are self-taught, and/or that have less traditional backgrounds. Such people are less wedded to one way of doing things and are therefore more likely to arrive at unique intersections.
Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures. Harvard Business School Press, 2004
In professional life, an interdisciplinary team might consist of one or more surgeons, anesthesiologists, radiologists, nurses, therapists, and social workers. In a business setting, an interdisciplinary or cross-functional team might feature inventors, designers, marketers, the sales force, and representatives drawn from different levels of management. Members of such teams are granted considerable latitude on the assumption that they will exit their habitual silos and engage in the boldest forms of connection making.
Howard Gardner, Five Minds for the Future. Harvard Business Press, 2008
The goal of arts integration is bringing the arts wholly and multidimensionality into the service of the learning mind. It leads toward interdisciplinarity, not via an inflexible commitment to cross-subject teaching, but because of the growing recognition that exposure to the arts enhances a student’s prospect of learning and achieving in general. Not only do the arts foster a set of transferable academic competencies such as creativity, intellectual risk-taking, or the ability to see multiple solutions to a problem, but arts-rich curricula also appear to enhance a student’s likelihood to self-identify as a “learner.” Within this frame, the arts are not only learned, they help constitute the process of learning itself.Michael Wakeford, Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century.
Columbia College Chicago, 2004
Generalization from one problem to another is a function of the individual searching for similarities between new problems and old, guided by previous experience with similar problems and by instruction in how to interpret and solve such problems. But people often do not recognize the link between subject matters nested in different contexts until the underlying similarities are pointed out to them. As teachers work with each other and with teaching artists to bring the arts into the curriculum, they find that the process of construing an integrated curriculum requires them to make the similarities between the elements they wish to blend together explicit. As they work to articulate the themes, processes, and content they are bringing to the table, each offering is specified as it is presented for integration. These conversations are essential to teaching. They are fueled by the rich association of experience and emotion that teachers bring to the curriculum. If arts integration animates students, it profoundly engages their teachers as well, for in these conversations their own construction of curriculum becomes artful.Madeleine Grumet, Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century.
Columbia College Chicago, 2004
