Senior Seminar in Interdisciplinary Studies:

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faculty sometimes referred to IDS as a “bail-out” degree because of it, but this kind of rigorous synthesizing and reorganizing of interoperable curricular parts is much like the process of research itself, where as we learn, we take a general topic and turn it into a focused study or argument, crafting and naming our conclusions only after lengthy exploration and discovery.

Most Physical and Occupational Therapy students currently build programs through #PlymouthIDS, as do Pre-Med students.

we’ve grown in enrollments by 1,150%. This is not a story about scale. This is a story about what happens when a program refocuses pedagogy around learners, and retools program design in order to create more flexible structures to support degree completion and student agency.

Where there is freedom to share and collaborate, there is often also freedom to abuse and exploit, so we should be careful not to indulge in idealized notions of participation, sharing, and openness that may be misguided.

Subscribing, following, and commenting on other scholars’ blogs, for example, will at some point become too much of a time commitment.

the type of education offered by these initiatives appears to be reserved for students who are intrinsically motivated, self-directed, and have the necessary prior knowledge to succeed;

“Education is a matter of sharing, and … [open practices] enable extremely efficient and affordable sharing”

free and open access to educational opportunity is a basic human right

research and education in every part of the world are … more free to flourish

If scientists and researchers have open access to the world’s academic journal articles and data, will diseases be cured more quickly?

students are empowered to learn what they need/want to learn, and the journey of learning is often more important than any predefined learning outcomes.

open teaching involves devising ways to expose the in-class experiences to those who are not in the class so that they can participate as fully as possible.

when you buy something, you should actually get the thing you paid for.

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

Consequently, the Internet was born at a severe disadvantage, as preexisting laws discouraged people from realizing the full potential of the network.

Education is a matter of sharing, and the open educational resources approach is designed specifically to enable extremely efficient and affordable sharing.

Those educators who share the most thoroughly of themselves with the greatest proportion of their students are the ones we deem most successful.

Education is, first and foremost, an enterprise of sharing.

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

the meaningful nature of learning that is embedded in valued relationships, practice, and culture

link a broader and more diverse range of culture, knowledge, and expertise to educational opportunity.

It means treating college like total immersion in a foreign country, exploring courses and extracurricular opportunities beyond one’s normal range of interests and experiences.

Students learn what Sha calls “synthesis,” the ability to combine knowledge and insights from everyone and everything, including from constraints.

Make the major minor.

Electives can feel like afterthoughts rather than survival skills.

A well-rounded education became increasingly important for advancement throughout the private sector, which relied on literate, skilled employees.

the development of even more disciplines that add to the variety of knowledge within the world.

law or medicine

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

The sub-disciplines are considered branches off of the disciplines which encompass fields like Psychology, Visual Arts, or Physics.

There were no degrees awarded after completion, but it was a way for students to gain extra knowledge and skills.

In 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.

Unity of Knowledge: Being able to learn more so that you have the ability to connect with more knowledge. Most majors and fields look at parts of the world, but there is something beautiful and exciting about trying to step back and see how things connect.

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

Many complex or practical problems can only be understood by pulling together insights and methodologies from a variety of disciplines.

But content, methods, and epistemologies are the central building blocks of disciplines, and it is helpful to understand these as you get started in Interdisciplinary Studies.

The various fruits can be served side by side, they can be chopped up and served as a fruit salad, or they can be finely blended so that the distinctive flavor of each is no longer recognizable, yielding instead the delectable experience of the smoothie.

We must rid it of unnecessary and wasteful duplication, and create coherence and integrity in our curricula.

college has become a chaotic maze where students try to pick up something useful as they search for the exit

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

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.

but sometimes the structures across departments do not align with one another, making interdisciplinarity collaboration a challenge.

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.

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.

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.

Now the question becomes: how do we combine interdisciplinarity and education to make learning more relevant?

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.

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.

The goal of interdisciplinarity is to be relevant now.

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

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

To overcome the negative sides of specialization, to retain its vitality, the academy must cultivate interdisciplinary knowledge and research.

The Fulbright Scholar Program has no interdisciplinary category--no interdisciplinarians need apply

The interdisciplinary community can become "cut off from fresh infusions of disciplinary knowledge." It can slide into naive generalism with little disciplinary training

Compartmentalization, besides lack of education, is the enemy; an enemy that can only be conquered through holistic scholarship and education:

narrow disciplinarity is frequently accompanied by a social cost.

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

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.

"Your planet is very beautiful," [said the little prince]. "Has it any oceans?" "I couldn't tell you," said the geographer. . . . "But you are a geographer!" "Exactly," the geographer said. "But I am not an explorer. I haven't a single explorer on my planet. It is not the geographer who goes out to count the towns, the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the oceans, and the deserts. The geographer is much too important to go loafing about. He does not leave his desk."

Thanks to an interdisciplinary research approach scientists are not able to find ones vein without any pain!

I couldn’t even imagine my excitement if I attended a school with zero majors. If every single person build his or her degree from the bottom up, how creative and amazing would that be?

Many say that colleges around the world are simply watering holes filled with creativity, and talent so why not start with higher education to incorporate the interdisciplinary knowledge one will need to be successful within life!

interdisciplinary studies is proven to broaden our intellectual horizons

higher education is a key component to a successful life in my opinion

being able to think abstractly

“I will not settle for less!

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

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.

Students are able to combine multiple disciplines and pursue different ways of thinking about the same problem or subject.

Interdisciplinary studies allows students to enter college and assume the role of captain in their personalized exploration of knowledge.

If an applicant can’t work in a team, write a grant, or engage meaningfully with other people, he may be turned away from a job or his career may not flourish.

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

I believe interdisciplinary will grow out of its vast supply of disciplines and learn from history how to create a new methodology of evaluating and solving problems.

but how much of it is multidisciplinary, rather than interdisciplinary as it should be?

come together as an entire social community

they are able to still make a social connection when in competition

they were able to make lesson plans based off each other’s knowledge and experience.

we need it to grow and show its potential.

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.

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.

Today, technology permeates our daily lives, drives our economy, and delivers our higher education

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.

The development of the disciplines we know today has been an ongoing process since the beginning of human communication.

Advancements in technology have allowed people from all over the world to attend universities, opposed to the first academy that was only able to educate people who were in walking distance.

Disciplines have other aspects as well, such as theories and assumptions.

Methods are the way that we study the content of a discipline. It is the how of a discipline.

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

there is something beautiful and exciting about trying to step back and see how things connect.

Having a broad understanding of many disciplines to gain a better comprehend and come up with a conclusion on why something is the way it is.

you can mix them together to get totally new colors (interdisciplinarity).

“Interdisciplinarity” is more like a fruit smoothie

Universities across the country are giving personal web domains to their students.

The question bigger than data ownership is how to make ownership over ideas happen.

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

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.

While some schools are turning to social media monitoring firms to keep an eye on students online, rarely do schools give students the opportunity to demonstrate the good work that they do publicly.