One concern that we have in looking at the plan as it is now, is that the clusters seem potentially limiting.

For this reason, we still believe that General Education is key, since it allows us to have broader skills and knowledge that can help us as our fields evolve in new directions over the years.

Students want the ability to control our own education rather than feel like we’re being shuffled through a system

Learning should be exploratory and fun, exactly what interdisciplinary studies is trying to do.

An overarching fear of interdisciplinarity is the “10,000 hour rule,” meaning interdisciplinary students might graduate as masters of nothing. 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.

making interdisciplinarity collaboration a challeng

The five major barriers blocking interdisciplinary students from success are: attitude, communication, academic structure, funding, and career development.

There would be no place for interdisciplinarity if the disciplines didn’t come first

Society needs people to be masters in specific areas because they contribute to the understanding of the world at large.

Why is it desirable to be a “master?”

If she goes to college and studies a single discipline—like biology—and doesn’t take any classes except ones that pertain to her major, she will graduate as a near-master in her field.

10,000 hours of hands-on, in-depth, focused energy in a discipline, he will be a master of it. That’s eight hours every day for nearly three and a half years.

Everything in the world is interrelated.

employers like employees who know what they want, are confident in their decisions, think independently, know their strengths and weaknesses, and are curious about life.

Suddenly, education is relevant again.

Students who follow this format learn more about themselves and what they want from their educational experience than students who passively accept a predetermined curriculum based on a single field of study.

By pursuing interdisciplinary studies in college, students are able to develop important skills like solving complex problems and thinking outside the box.

The goal of interdisciplinarity is to be relevant now.

in the hands of students.

Education is about more than passing a test or being accepted to the “right” school, it’s about self-discovery and personal growth as an individual.

If students aren’t free to be curious, engaged, and invested in what they’re learning, then they may never be curious, engaged, or invested in their lives

If students are living their lives in preparation for life, when will they start living?

College is just one step on the continual stairway of advancement,

Brooks shines a light on the damaging effect that order and control have had on modern classrooms. Below, he describes the “work now, play later” ideology that has permeated across college campuses since the 1980’s:

e “suffer now, succeed later”

“why is the sky blue?”

Education is not a simulation preparing students for an imaginary destination.

If students are not engaged with a subject because they believe it’s irrelevant, no amount of force will change their minds, or if they do change their minds, the decision comes from outside, not from within

“Why do I need to learn this? I’ll never use it in real life.”

In some cases, interdisciplinary research requires cooperation of experts with different disciplinary backgrounds and different ways of thinking--a notoriously difficult undertaking.

It is of course impossible, in our age, to become an expert in everything

Outsider's Perspective:

Creative Breakthroughs: The very act of creation often involves the bringing together of previously unrelated ideas

The major challenge is the elucidation of interconnections between disciplines, fiends, and sub-fields.

Gruenwald speaks particularly on interdisciplinary sciences. He believes that remarkably, the natural sciences have turned into interdisciplinary engagement by the inner logic of discovery.

For example, one with a degree in education may apply for a job with over 100 other applicants; where as maybe only 2 out of the 100 are interdisciplinary studies.

Interdisciplinary research clusters and programs are being established across the United States,

First let me start of by saying, higher education is a key component to a successful life in my opinion

Declaring this major feels like me declaring, “I will not settle for less! I will make the most of my opportunities!”

You can be your own self and that is who you should want to be most!

Just think about it, if everyone just stuck to guidelines and tradition, the world would never grow and would never have the chance to become any better.

I am creating and envisioning a possibility that others may not see or may not have the confidence to direct.

Engaging in Interdisciplinary studies has broadened my understanding of entrepreneurship, abstract thinking, metacognition, and love of learning.

One of the clear benefits of an interdisciplinary degree is for students to learn how they learn and the way their brains work.

“one of the biggest barriers to achieving true interdisciplinary study in education environments is the necessity for collaboration of educators.

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.

Many students entering college for the first time are surprised by the way it changes their thinking, identity, and perspective

Why should anyone, educator or otherwise, tell an eighteen-year-old student what they should or should not learn?

demonstrating that graduates need more than one kind of skill if they want to compete in today’s job market.

Not everyone, however, supported the shift towards specialization at the turn of the twentieth century

Interdisciplinary studies, as a concept, would not be possible without the foundational structure of disciplinary studies.

We see the roots of interdisciplinary beginning to show in society,

lists the psychologists, school social workers, case managers, occupational therapists, physical therapists and nurses who are present in developing and preserving a child’s mental well-being.

interdisciplinary is just now starting to enter the discussion.

Without the disciplines, interdisciplinary would have nothing to build on

“…the disciplines are the place where we begin, but not where we end.”

“These faculty members share common formative experiences…and appreciate a common canon of writings by the “founding fathers” of the disciplines” (Repko, 90).

how they interact with each other and in which ways they belong to a social community. In most disciplines such as say dentistry people within that field if they’re close together location-wise they’re in competition with each other.

Looking back it makes so much more sense that they were able to make lesson plans based off each other’s knowledge and experience.

Many people as students observe professors and teachers in high school and middle school as being a part of individual social groups

Mathematics and music were some of the first disciplines that were taught in the Greek era.

Of course this knowledge exchanged was not labelled. The earliest recording of an academic discipline, similar to the ones we know today, was with the Greeks in Socrates’ time.

Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Formal Sciences, and Professions and Applied Sciences. Under the main disciplines are the sub-disciplines. The sub-disciplines are considered branches off of the disciplines which encompass fields like Psychology, Visual Arts, or Physics.

It is field that is taught, studied, and researched in a college or university setting.

continuously changing as time goes on, making the idea more difficult to define.

Although it is a widely used concept, very few undergraduates can actually define what a “discipline” is.

Both establishments started off teaching rhetoric and religion.

According to the Guiness Book of World Records, The University of Al-Karaouine in Morocco, Africa is the oldest continuously operating, degree-granting university in the world.

In ancient times, it was common for a youth to have a platonic relationship with an elder.

eventually spreading across the world.

The academy began with teachers simply preaching a topic of their interest.

the idea of having a designated place to learn has been around for over a millennium.

The disciplines that we have been taught since the beginning of elementary school have been such a crucial part in who we are as students, and who we become in our careers after graduation.

Third, there is the epistemology of the discipline.

methodology. In the case of a research project, you might be expected not just to explain your findings, but also to explain your methodology, or how you reached your findings.

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.

Content is generally what is “covered” by coursework in the discipline. It can include facts, concepts, ideas, and texts. Content is the what of a discipline.

That makes Plymouth sounds so much safer, but in order to know for sure, we have to set the numbers into 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.

we may need to break the question up into parts and look at study time, social life, living away from home, economic issues, mental health, oppression, and more. Studying these parts will help us get a sense of the overall reasons for the 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.”

Sometimes we break problems down into smaller parts so that we can solve it piece by piece.

challenges to accreditation processes

Academic Freedom: Freedom to study our interests, in the way we best comprehend knowledge.

Genuine expertise often comes with a high price that may not always be worth the time spent.

. Most real problems are not simple, and they demand thinking from a variety of academic fields.

Creative Breakthroughs: Taking a new perspective from a different angle can yield unexpected pathways that were not visible before.

There are many reasons why approaching a problem, concept, project, or educational path in an interdisciplinary way can benefit learners and the world.

Create a degree, major, or educational program

Instrumental Interdisciplinarity: This is when you do interdisciplinary work in order to reach an outcome of some kind

transdisciplinarity builds bridges across disciplines

Both multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are valid ways to bring different academic perspectives together.

“Interdisciplinarity” is more like a fruit smoothie, where the disciplines are blended together–integrated– to create something new.

Multidisciplinary: Drawing on information and methods from two or more disciplines.

Interdisciplinarity: Incorporates several fields of study to allow collaboration among diverse disciplines to either specify or broaden students’ education, to gain understanding, and/or to problem solve.

Promoting digital ownership is different than assigning work in publicly accessible spaces.

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

The first type of ‘Domain’ took audience into account, considering the implications of public scholarship, representation, and student agency. The second, in many ways, mirrored the traditional pedagogical structure by assigning papers or short answer assignments to be posted online through blogs.

“To own one’s domain gives students an understanding of how Web technologies work. It puts them in a much better position to control their work, their data, their identity online.”

It is a living portfolio, my representation in the digital world.

To own one’s domain gives students an understanding of how Web technologies work. It puts them in a much better position to control their work, their data, their identity online.

Education technology – and more broadly, the culture of education – does a terrible job with this sort of portability and interoperability. When a student moves to a new school, for example, they often have to request their transcript, a document that lists their courses and their grades.

And if a student owns their own domain, as she moves from grade to grade and from school to school, all that information – their learning portfolio – can travel with them.

we talked a lot more about technical issues (backup, recovery, privacy options, hosting laws in different countries, etc). But we also talked a lot more about digital citizenship, safety, control, design, etc. The kids saw the site much more as their own and their responsibility.”

One student uses her domain to showcase her artwork.

Having one’s own domain means that students have much more say over what they present to the world, in terms of their public profiles, professional portfolios, and digital identities.

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.

but their own domain – the dot com (or dot net, etc) of the student’s choosing.

Today, UMW and a growing number of other schools believe that students need a proprietary online space in order to be intellectually productive.

Students have little agency when it comes to education technology – much like they have little agency in education itself.

These legislative efforts stress the need to protect students when they’re online, safeguarding

She thereby enriches the perspective on each subject that she brings to students with knowledge drawn from the others and offering an example of another approach: the joint appointment of faculty members to several departments.

Unless we help our students acquire their own identity, they will end up at the mercy of experts — or worse, at the mercy of charlatans posing as experts

The total amount of collected information doubles every two or three years.

"A technical problem of transportation, such as the building of a freeway, becomes a land-use problem, linked with economic, environmental, conservation, ethical, and political issues. Can we really draw a boundary? When we ask to improve a situation, particularly if it is a public one, we find ourselves facing not a problem, but a cluster of problems ... and none of these problems can be tackled using linear or sequential methods."

the complexity of the world requires us to have a better understanding of the relationships and connections between all fields that intersect and overlap

In fact, mass higher education is heading toward what I call the Home Depot approach to education, where there is no differentiation between consumption and digestion, or between information and learning, and no guidance -- or even questioning — about what it means to be an educated and cultured person.

Today's students fulfill general-education requirements, take specialized courses in their majors, and fill out their schedule with some electives, but while college catalogs euphemistically describe this as a "curriculum," it is rarely more than a collection of courses, devoid of planning, context, and coherence

For most students, college is a time for self-discovery, for developing passionate interests, and for trying to weave them into a meaningful career.