Many people as students observe professors and teachers in high school and middle school as being a part of individual social groups, kind of like cliques. It was easiest to see in high school, the English teachers would gather together, and the social studies teachers especially without very much deviation from their groups. This was partially due to their classrooms being located so close together but also because of their shared disciplines. It never really came to mind that teachers of the same subject were together during the school day simply to discuss developments in their field; I just thought it worked out that they were friends. Looking back, it makes so much more sense that they were able to make lesson plans based off each other’s knowledge and experience.

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?

“Now children’s mental health care is interdisciplinary.” The author, Gail Rosenblum, then 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.

Our society is only starting to get the ball rolling on interdisciplinary communication.

Even when grouping together to attempt solving a problem as a team, an interdisciplinary attempt can end up being multidisciplinary, where insights can come from two or more disciplines, but lack integration.

The disciplines, where we find wealths of specific knowledge and, on occasion, narrow-minded specialists, are the very building blocks of interdisciplinary studies.

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

We see the roots of interdisciplinarity beginning to show in society; now we need it to grow and show its potential. Much like the fledgling leaf in the photo above, I believe interdisciplinarity will grow out of its vast supply of disciplines and learn from history how to create a new methodology of evaluating and solving problems.

The medical field is most likely one of the most specialized fields in the world, even though it seems the human body and its complex systems would be the number one use for interdisciplinary study. This concerns me because it is my ultimate goal to become a dermatologist. Considering this, I already know that nutrition, age, and mental state all contribute to the health of one’s skin, and I would love to be able to study these interactions with other specialists outside my discipline one day. 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?

Our society is only starting to get the ball rolling on interdisciplinary communication

Students have been learning and teachers have been teaching since the beginning of human existence, probably often without even knowing it.

With Interdisciplinary Studies growing rapidly throughout the United States, students are now able to create their own fields of study by combining many disciplines and making it into their major that reflects their own values, passions, and interests.

Teaching these disciplines strongly promoted agriculture, science, and technology which ultimately rules our lives in today’s society.

College began to evolve from an elite privilege for only certain kinds of wealthy or powerful people to an essential career resource that could benefit any student.

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.

We have known of the concepts of the “academy” and the “disciplines” for as long as we have been schooled. Although these concepts have been thrown around our heads, we have never really been asked for the history or the definition of the academy or the disciplines. 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.

Online courses provide the convenience of not having a designated time to learn, but they at first lacked the legitimacy of a physical university.  The first fully online university, that received accreditation, was Jones International University in 1993.

Harvard began with a single house and a single acre of land, but has now grown to an astounding 5,083 acres.

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.  The university was originally a mosque and actually created by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri.  Al-Azhar University, centered in Egypt, is another academy that was founded by the 10th century.  Both establishments started off teaching rhetoric and religion. Closely following behind the academies in Africa, Oxford University in England became the first for English-speaking individuals.  Universities of this time focused on faith because it was the foundation of their civilizations.  Although these institutions began nearly a millennium ago, it was closer to the 20th century when they expanded to more traditional fields of study.

Both establishments started off teaching rhetoric and religion

n ancient times, it was common for a youth to have a platonic relationship with an elder.  The elder would mentor and guide the adolescent, but it was a one-on-one basis.

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.

We have known of the concepts of the “academy” and the “disciplines” for as long as we have been schooled. Although these concepts have been thrown around our heads, we have never really been asked for the history or the definition of the academy or the disciplines.

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.

Despite the barriers standing in the way of interdisciplinarity, most undergraduate students aren’t affected by them. For many students and future scholars, undergraduate studies is an introduction to the world of learning.

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.

Every department has the programs, faculty, staff, and organization it needs to advance learning within its given field, but sometimes the structures across departments do not align with one another, making interdisciplinarity collaboration a challenge.

Jargon poses a threat to cross-disciplinary collaboration because people can’t communicate with each other if they can’t understand each other.

The attitudinal barrier between democrats and republicans makes bipartisan compromise almost impossible.

In the case of interdisciplinary studies, an attitudinal barrier would be a scholar or researcher who has no interest in collaborating with other disciplines or people.

Attitude

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.

Every tile plays a role in the outcome of a mosaic, but the mosaic wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t an artist, or group of artists, to put the tiles together.

There would be no place for interdisciplinarity if the disciplines didn’t come first, but collaboration is sometimes just as important, if not more important, than individualized focus.

Without these scholars, deep, investigative discoveries would be impossible.

That’s how long it takes to be a master in any field. Or, at least, that’s what Malcolm Gladwell—renowned journalist, author, and speaker—argues. If someone spends 10,000 hours of hands-on, in-depth, focused energy in a discipline, he will be a master of it.

Education is exploration, a phenomenon that cannot be neatly packaged and universally distributed.

Many students pursue higher education to learn a specific skill or trade because they have the expectation that there is a need for their skill or trade in society at large.

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

In order to break apart and reorganize a system, a preliminary system must already exist. In the case of education, the modern disciplines—science, art, social science, humanities, and applied science—are considered the prologue to interdisciplinarity.

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

Despite the advantages, Michelle Appleby, senior lecturer of education studies at the University of Derby, has expressed some of the disadvantages that interdisciplinary students may face: “one of the biggest barriers to achieving true interdisciplinary study in education environments is the necessity for collaboration of educators.” One of the capstones of higher education is the collaboration between students, professors, and advisors. Departments are made of people working towards the same goal, taking similar classes, and exchanging similar ideas. Interdisciplinary students are removed from the “common core” experience of education, creating a personalized layout instead. 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.

Education is exploration, a phenomenon that cannot be neatly packaged and universally distributed.

Many students pursue higher education to learn a specific skill or trade because they have the expectation that there is a need for their skill or trade in society at large.

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

He believed that a student, by age eighteen, was old enough to select his own courses and pursue his own imagination (Zakaria 54-7).

By integrating these fields within the interdisciplinary studies, the information has become more advanced and any missing gaps of information have started to closed in due to the overlap of information.

The different disciplines that the article discusses are ethics, explaining the different ethics or morals within the childhood research. It talks about childhood studies, taking children from a wide range of age groups and populations and how certain ethics and morals apply to them. There is a medical aspect integrated, which discusses the health science and services for the children. There is also the discipline of law integrated as well. The law aspect covers the state-made laws creates by the courts in both Western Europe and North America.

Flights. Something that most of us love to hate. Making life much more convenient, but can also be painful and scary. Flights are a prime example of what interdisciplinary is. You don’t just appear in the sky, there are tons of details that go into flying that many people don’t even realize.

And that feels really good because unlike many other majors where it is easy to feel trapped or to feel stuck in this routine that everyone who has graduated with your degree has gone through- the same process; this study has me standing alone and in this case, that isn’t a bad thing.

With metacognition, you are able to take your mind out of society’s views and have your own views.

Secondly, being able to think abstractly, is very significant to me. It is so important to have different ideas that may even seem impossible. In today’s world one of the top aspects an employer will look for when hiring an individual, is creativity. Will this person be able to benefit my company with creative, new, and different ideas? Can they use creativity to solve complex problems in the workplace that haven’t been used in the past?

That possibility is going to open so many doors for me.

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.

College is just one step on the continual stairway of advancement, and they are always aware that they must get to the next step (law school, medical school, whatever) so that they can progress up the steps after that.”

“why is the sky blue?”

The relevancy of education is often overlooked by students, especially young students who have not yet graduated from high school.

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

In such cases, those who stop at the disciplinary edge run the risk of tunnel vision.

An outsider’s perspective, then, is particularly valuable at times of crisis.

The natives live and breathe their customs; the perceptive foreigner doesn’t. The same goes for the history of ideas: outsiders are less prone to ignore anomalies and to resist new conceptual frameworks.

Interdisciplinarity is best seen as bringing together distinctive components of two or more disciplines. In academic discourse, interdisciplinarity typically applies to four realms: knowledge, research, education, and theory. Interdisciplinary knowledge involves familiarity with components of two or more disciplines.

now being deluged by torrents of new information almost daily

No people in our own time could rationally proclaim that they knew everything about everything, or even everything about their own fields

qualitative, using interviews, case studies, and observations of human behavior

In order to understand why so many college students do poorly in the first semester at college, 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.

amalgamation

nterdisciplinarity is like mixing paint. You can lay colors side-by-side to create beautiful paintings (multidisciplinarity), or you can mix them together to get totally new colors (interdisciplinarity).

“Interdisciplinarity is a more integrative approach to learning.”

As a people, we need to understand where we were, where we are, and where we are going

In 1999 74 percent of full-time students worked while attending college, and nearly half of them worked at least 25 hours a week. Unfortunately, many of those student workers say that holding a job hurts their grades, as well as limits their choice of courses. By one estimate, college students typically spend less than half the time on their studies than the faculty expects.

Because many high schools don’t do their jobs

In just four years, students are expected to be informed about such issues as our nation’s history, democratic society, global economy, international relations, and computer technology, and, for many, to be prepared for graduate study in medicine, law, business, art, architecture, or technical schools.

continue to gamble on simplistic solutions, such as building prisons to solve the crime and drug problems.

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

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

Home Depot approach

But a major failure of our higher-education system is that it has largely come to serve as a job-readiness program. 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 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.

Do I Own My Domain if You Grade it?

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

As originally conceived at the Virginia liberal arts university, the Domains initiative provides students and faculty with their own Web domain. It isn’t simply a blog or a bit of Web space and storage at the school’s dot-edu, but their own domain – the dot com (or dot net, etc) of the student’s choosing. The school facilitates the purchase of the domain; it helps with installation of WordPress and other open source software; it offers both technical and instructional support; and it hosts the site until graduation when domain ownership is transferred to the student.

UMW helps them have more control over their scholarship, data, and digital identity.