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

interdisciplinary beginning to show in society, now we need it to grow and show its potential.

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?

“…the disciplines are the place where we begin, but not where we end.” This quote from Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies by Allen F. Repko captures the essence of where interdisciplinary study comes from.

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.

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.

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

Social Sciences, including anthropology, economics, and political science emerged. The sub-disciplines of sociology, psychology, and history soon followed. These disciplines arose to address new social conditions and applied a scientific and distinctively empirical approach to studying the problems of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society.

Important academic subjects taught were reading, writing, geometry, music, dancing, and astronomy.

Mathematics and music were some of the first disciplines that were taught in the Greek era. In the evolution of education, when Plato opened his academy, he taught social issues such as politics and education alongside the already established discipline of mathematics. Continuing with established disciplines, the Romans decided to focus more on the discipline of law.

leaving one to ponder how the academy will look even a decade from now.

complete a bachelor’s degree in two years from an accredited institution.

first fully online university

Degree courses from television broadcasts

 Distance education

 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.

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

This is called “setting the problem or issue in context.”

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.

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.”

challenges to accreditation processes that demand strict disciplinary content coverage

may not like the idea since it shakes up the basic organizational structure of our silos and can draw resources and power away from the individual disciplinary units.

Interdisciplinarity’s drawbacks include being seen as a threat due to the versatility and potential agitation of change in a stagnant environment.

Academic Freedom: Freedom to study our interests, in the way we best comprehend knowledge. We can work to decrease the amount of control the disciplines exert over how we learn, and instead put disciplinary knowledge to work in ways that reflect our interests and concerns.

This can lead us to truly change the world, structure our world differently, and see ourselves as connected in a wide web of humanity.

Flexibility of Research:Working with colleagues from other fields of study and expanding your horizons in terms of what and how you research are surely the pros of having a more flexible field.

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

analyzing weather patterns, looking at airplane construction, studying her life story

When people are trying to avoid the cookie cutter pathway to how an outcome may seem.

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

NSTRUMENTAL or CRITICAL

ransdisciplinarity 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.

Transdisciplinarity

which do not mix much or change shape themselves.

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

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.

1. The audience doesn’t change?

Traditional assignments don’t necessarily empower students when they have to post them in a public space.

“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.”

“The kids came in to the class with what I would call fair and average teen tech skills,” he said. “Lots of iPods, iPads, and laptops. Lots of Facebook and Instagram. But none of them had a presence online they were in control of before this.”

Students have control over the look and feel of their own sites, including what’s shared publicly.

Students would frame, curate, share, and direct their own ‘engagement streams’ throughout the learning environment.

it is important to have one’s own space in order to develop one’s ideas and one’s craft

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.