the need for learning contexts that bring together in-school and out-of-school learning and activity.

offer engaging formats for interactivity and self-expression

Without taking an open pedagogy class I would never have realized this about myself.

Five paragraph sentence structure

“I’m a 4.0 student I should be able to do this. It’s just a stupid blog post!” I remember yelling at myself at two o’clock in the morning when the post was due and I still didn’t have a topic. This mounted frustration produced a ‘screw this’ attitude that resulted in me just reading one of the articles and ‘writing something about it’.

a learner-centered  vision for higher education.

Try, explore, fail, share, revise.

We can involve students in the process of curating content for courses, either by offering them limited choices between different texts or by offering them solid time to curate a future unit more or less on their own (or in a group) as a research project

Encourage students to apply their expertise to serve their community. Partner with nonprofit organizations to create opportunities for students to apply their research or marketing skills.[24] Or ask them to write (and submit for publication) op-ed pieces[25]

Teach your students how to edit Wikipedia articles. By adding new content, revising existing content, adding citations, or adding images, students can (with the support of the Wiki Education Foundation[20]) make direct contributions to one of the most popular public repositories for information.

Build OERs with your students. Though students may be beginners with most of the content in your course, they are often more adept than you at understanding what beginning students need in order to understand the material.

Even the simple act of adding problem sets or discussion questions to an existing open textbook will help contribute to knowledge, to the quality of available OERs, and to your students’ sense of doing work that matters.

When faculty use OERs, we aren’t just saving a student money on textbooks: we are directly impacting that student’s ability to enroll in, persist through, and successfully complete a course.[15]

Even though 67% of college students in Florida and 54% of those in British Columbia[14] cannot afford to purchase at least one of their required course textbooks, we more readily attribute their inability to complete assigned readings to laziness and entitlement than to unaffordability.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights[12] asserts that “higher education shall be equally accessible to all.” Yet, even in North America in 2017, “the likelihood of earning a college degree is tied to family income” (Goldrick-Rab).[13]

Mike Caulfield, for example, has argued[9] that while OER has been driving the car for a while, Open Pedagogy is in the backseat ready to hop over into the front.

open licensing to share their education and research resources?

Open teaching provides individuals who might otherwise never have the opportunity to experience postsecondary learning a free and open chance to participate.

Faculty are also responding by voting to support “open access policies” at their universities (see http://roarmap.eprints.org), which typically grant the university the rights necessary to archive and make articles written by faculty freely and openly available on the Internet.

Many feel that this represents a scholarly publishing status quo that is completely out of balance and that the researcher should control the reproduction and distribution rights to his or her work.

Why should we be required to pay a second time for the thing we’ve already paid for? Or worse—if every school district in your state pays to license the curriculum, you’ve now paid for it 250 times.5

Through these grants, state or federal governments commission the creation of these resources using taxpayer dollars. In other words, when the National Science Foundation gives a grant to a university to produce a pre-engineering curriculum, you and I have already paid for it.

Open educational resources provide an immediate, proven way to make education significantly more affordable and accessible for students.

Instead of graduating with a comprehensive understanding of a single discipline like anthropology or economics, they graduate with a smattering of knowledge, spread across many fields.

Interdisciplinary studies allows students to experiment and ask questions. It encourages them to follow their hearts and enjoy their undergraduate experiences. Learning should be exploratory and fun, exactly what interdisciplinary studies is trying to do.

is collaboration possible without a common language

An example of an attitudinal barrier is the political climate of the United States. Conservatives and liberals are divided by their points-of-view and they’re unwilling, or perhaps incapable, of exchanging perspectives. Each party represents a cultural identity and people choose a party based on their values.  To reinforce their values, people surround themselves with media that reflects their political views, creating a self-propagating “echo chamber.” The attitudinal barrier between democrats and republicans makes bipartisan compromise almost impossible.

As important as it is for there to be highly specialized scholars in every discipline, it’s just as important to have interdisciplinary students building bridges between ideas, creating cohesive, universal collaboration.

Knowledge is like a mosaic: every tile represents a scholar who has spent an entire lifetime exploring a single idea.

Why is it desirable to be a “master?”

Because at the end of the day, your opinion and your thoughts matter, and you need to make those important to you before they are important to anyone else.

Starting with entrepreneurship, majoring in Interdisciplinary Studies has given me the confidence to create something of my own that may not be out there yet.

The question—“how do we do interdisciplinarity?”—is a rhetorical question because everyone is always already doing it. Now the question becomes: how do we combine interdisciplinarity and education to make learning more relevant?

If people want to be successful in life, it makes sense to understand the big picture, which is, in a word, interdisciplinarity.

Interdisciplinary students are actively engaged with their education, involved with every decision that’s made. It’s all on them.

Interdisciplinary studies is a disruptive ideology that takes control away from educators and puts it where it belongs: in the hands of students. “Work now, play later” sends the message to students that now is never good enough; that education will be relevant later. The goal of interdisciplinarity is to be relevant now.

One of the benefits of a common core trajectory is the sense of community it brings to education, a sense of community that some interdisciplinary students may not experience in the same way that traditional students experience it.

Many students entering college for the first time are surprised by the way it changes their thinking, identity, and perspective. The unique environment created by residential college life is an incredible experience for most young, college-aged students. It’s such a transformative experience for so many people that it seems almost irrational to expect students to know what they want from it before they arrive.

If students wander around at their own will, these educators argued, they may leave school with an incomplete or inconclusive education.

For example, one of his most influential reforms was advocacy for a curriculum based on students’ interests rather than a pre-established curriculum. He believed that a student, by age eighteen, was old enough to select his own courses and pursue his own imagination (Zakaria 54-7)

The most interesting part to me about social communities within disciplines is that “faculty members share common formative experiences…and appreciate a common canon of writings by the ‘founding fathers’ of the disciplines” (Repko 90). This caught my attention because the founding fathers in the different types of art and psychology have always interested me and I hold a lot of respect for most of them. It intrigues me to think that I will be able to belong to my own disciplinary community of art therapy and be a member of the American Art Therapy Association while also being a part of the art and psychology social communities on their own.

Already we see much collaboration in medicine between researchers and doctors, but how much of it is multidisciplinary, rather than interdisciplinary as it should be?

If it ever seems as though the disciplines are scorned, the only thing we deem negative is their lack of integration with other disciplines. We see the roots of interdisciplinarity beginning to show in society and in educational institutions, and now we need it to grow and show its potential.

The great aspect of the twenty-first century is that mostly all disciplines encompass aspects of other disciplines creating a multidisciplinary approach.

Students get to choose what they want to study based on their own personal passions, unlike in the eighteenth and nineteenth century when there were limited fields of study.

“Harvard University, the oldest university in the U.S., graduated about 70% clergymen in the seventeenth century, 45% in the eighteenth, and by the latter half of the nineteenth century, only 10%” (Kaufman, “The History of Higher Education in the United States”)

An academic discipline is a field of study in higher education. It is field that is taught, studied, and researched in a college or university setting. Some disciplines have been around as long as the academy, while some have just blossomed within the last few years

The most dramatic advancements have occurred in the 50 years leaving one to ponder how the academy will look even a decade from now.

 After completing the chapter, they would mail it back and request the next one.  There were no degrees awarded after completion, but it was a way for students to gain extra knowledge and skills.

In 1869, Charles Eliot (21st president of Harvard) gave a speech stating that there is no best method or focus for learning, therefore Harvard will have them all.  Today, there are 11 academic units that Harvard has to offer including the prominent Business, Law and Medical programs.

. At the global level, this implies a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary educational programs. At the institutional level, this implies encouraging students to take at least one consciously integrative course.

The case for interdisciplinary education, it seems to me, is not as straightforward as its knowledge and research counterparts. Because educational philosophies are shaped in part by ideology, intuition, and aesthetics, the controversy about the extent, timing, and need for holistic education may well be irresolvable.

Despite the barriers and drawbacks, the foregoing discussion forcefully calls for a mild shift (in both attitudes and institutional arrangements) towards interdisciplinary knowledge and research. To overcome the negative sides of specialization, to retain its vitality, the academy must cultivate interdisciplinary knowledge and research. It must never forget that a vibrant community of scholars–just like a thriving ecosystem–nurtures specialists and generalists, diversity and interconnections.

Interdisciplinarians, by contrast, are forever treating themselves to the intellectual equivalent of exploring exotic lands.

The modern mind divides, specializes, thinks in categories: the Greek instinct was the opposite, to take the widest view, to see things as an organic whole. . . .

Previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is “a scientist,” and “knows” very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.

Ironically, in this age, one may know much about a subject and yet know little about its ramifications. I for one know decent people who know everything about the chemistry of CFCs and nothing about the ozone layer (Nissani, 1996); everything about internal combustion engines and nothing about global warming; everything about minimum wage legislation and nothing about poverty. Compartmentalization, besides lack of education, is the enemy; an enemy that can only be conquered through holistic scholarship and education:

Bertrand Russell’s (1960, p. xv) characterization of politics may still merit our attention: “It is the custom among those who are called ‘practical’ men,” he says, “to condemn any man capable of a wide survey as a visionary: no man is thought worthy of a voice in politics unless he ignores or does not know nine tenths of the most important relevant facts.” Even well-meaning statesmen may err because they do not understand the technical, social, or scientific aspects of a policy:

Suppose that you wished to understand the Soviet-American Cold War. Suppose further that you were interested in fathoming this entire conflict, not merely one or another of its aspects. A few years and a few bookshelves later, you might realize that most experts have failed to arrive at a self-contained portrait because they examined this subject from a single disciplinary perspective. An integrated approach, you might conclude, holds a greater promise of bringing you closer to a firm grasp of this complex subject than any important but one-sided study.

Regardless of the historical reality of unexplored gray areas, one point is perfectly clear: such areas include important topics which often require interdisciplinary research.

Crossdisciplinary Oversights: The gaps among [the social science] disciplines are much too large. . . .  As a result, many sociologists . . .[long continued] to draw their imagery of the Protestant Reformation from Max Weber, although professional historians have long since relegated his theories to the dustbin. In the same way, sociologists long continued to draw their imagery of primitive societies from Patterns of Culture far after the time when anthropologists had dismissed Benedict’s ethnographic depictions as quite misleading. In neither case does the rejection of the work deny the intriguing quality of the conceptual scheme, but it does brand the specific historical or ethnographic accounts as so fallacious empirically that the concepts would not be utilized without the most careful reconsideration. And, both cases serve to illustrate how the gap between disciplines has led to one of them relying on theories and data which are quite invalidated among the originating discipline (Wax, 1969, pp. 81-82).

Thus, if chance favors the prepared mind, and if preparation often involves grounding in two or more disciplines, then those who wish to speed up the growth of knowledge should promote, or at least tolerate, interdisciplinary knowledge and research.

It has become too easy to criticize esoteric research as narrow, detached, and trivial. Such criticism lacks an appreciation for the elegant way in which fields of study merge. . . .  Some links facilitate integration and thereby prevent specialization from becoming narrow-mindedness. . . .  We need to reconceptualize our model of disciplinary growth and specialization, adopting a more organic model that accounts for the intricate links among the many specializations. Our current mechanistic model divides disciplines into numerous blocks of specializations; it is inaccurate  . . . and misleading.

It has become too easy to criticize esoteric research as narrow, detached, and trivial. Such criticism lacks an appreciation for the elegant way in which fields of study merge. . . . 

Third, there is the epistemology of the discipline. This is tied to both content and methods. An epistemology is a worldview, ideology, or approach to truth and knowledge. For example, in math, the dominant epistemology is one of logic and objectivity.

. For example, your disciplines may be primarily quantitative, using numbers, measurements, and empirical research to understand its content. Or your disciplines may be primarily qualitative, using interviews, case studies, and observations of human behavior to understand its content.

Setting in Context: Sometimes we actually don’t want to carve a problem or concept into small bits, but instead want to see how something specific fits into a larger pattern or fabric.  This is called “setting the problem or issue in context.”

Drilling Down: Sometimes we break problems down into smaller parts so that we can solve it piece by piece.  This is called “drilling down” a problem. We can also think of breaking a larger whole into its parts in order to understand the whole more fully, and this is called “systems thinking.” Both are very useful for interdisciplinarians, since breaking a problem or concept down may help us see the different disciplines that are involved, which will then allow us to organize our research approach.

Note that the amalgamation quotient says nothing about quality: in some circumstances, a plain mango will surpass all the smoothies in the world; in others, only a fruit salad will do.

Transdisciplinarity: This term sometimes refers to work that seems to entirely transcend the realm of the academic disciplines altogether. More helpfully, though, the term can be used to describe work in which academics, using the tools of the disciplines, partner with stakeholders from outside the university. In this sense, transdisciplinarity builds bridges across disciplines, but also across the disciplinary structures altogether, linking the academic world with the practical world, and scholars with non-academics who are working on similar problems or ideas

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?” T.S. Eliot once asked. “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Colleges and universities must, once more, play a critical role in rediscovering that knowledge and that wisdom. Otherwise, they will resemble what Eliot described in a commentary on Dante’s Inferno, when he wrote to the effect that hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing.

Unfortunately, many of those student workers say that holding a job hurts their grades, as well as limits their choice of courses.

And when people do not know how to question deeply, to separate fact from fiction, and to give coherence and meaning to life, they can feel a deeply unsettling emptiness in their lives.

… and none of these problems can be tackled using linear or sequential methods

We must reform higher education to reconstruct the unity and value of knowledge.

I share this view as well as Jefferson’s optimism that societies become more democratic as citizens become more knowledgeable and cultured.

Instead of helping students learn and grow as individuals, find meaning in their lives, or understand their role in society, college has become a chaotic maze where students try to pick up something useful as they search for the exit: the degree needed to obtain decent employment. Today’s

The web is a network for conversations, and if students still see their audience as a teacher with a red pen, then nothing changes.

multimodal writing to information science, knowledge management, bibliographic instruction, and social networking. Fascinating and important innovations would emerge as students are able to shape their own cognition, learning, expression, and reflection in a digital age, in a digital medium. Students would frame, curate, share, and direct their own “engagement streams” throughout the learning environment.4

Yet higher education largely failed to empower the strong and effective imaginations that students need for creative citizenship in this new medium.

Too often, students’ work in these systems gets deleted over the summer months as schools aren’t in the business of permanently storing student work

the domain and all its content are the student’s to take with them. It is, after all, their education, their intellectual development, their work

students need a proprietary online space in order to be intellectually productive.

There’s some pushback against these proposals too, with arguments that restrictions on data might hinder research or the development of learning analytics or data-driven educational software.