Beware of Pidgin Minds: Pitfalls and Promises of Interdisciplinarity in Undergraduate Education

This paper discusses interdisciplinarity in undergraduate education. Having been involved with the design and administration of a major interdisciplinary program, the authors of this paper wish to describe the drawbacks inherent in attempting to catalyze integration simply by exposing undergraduate students to a disciplinary smorgasbord and by encouraging synthesis through application. As an alternative to this approach—which in their view may lead to the development of "pidgin minds"—they promise a model of pedagogic practice called "knowledge integration training" and involving the reflexive analysis of disciplinary perspectives in the context of team-taught courses. DICTIONARIES DEFINE PIDGIN as a particular type of oral expression arising in situations in which different people who do not know each other's language want to communicate for specific purposes—such as trade (the word "pidgin" is in fact the pidgin Anglo-Chinese version of the English word "business"). Pidgin languages have a very limited vocabulary, built upon the simplification of a heterogeneous mixture of words coming from different languages. Also, pidgin languages have no native speakers, since they are always spoken in addition to a mother tongue; consequently, they are very rudimentary, and while they may serve as the lingua franca of large regions, they lack the versatility of true languages. The argument presented in this paper is that certain features of current undergraduate education lead students to thinking processes that may be analogous to pidgin forms of communication, at least insofar as they are artificial, simplified, heterogeneous, rigid, and very rudimentary. In our opinion, this results chiefly from the perpetuation of curricular components that traditionally aim at achieving just the opposite result: a broadening and enrichment of undergraduate education. In addition, it may also derive from equally well-meaning efforts at creating new programs of study heavily infused with interdisciplinary zest. In other words, and quite ironically, it seems as if interdisciplinarity may have the potential of both fulfilling its obvious promise as an intellectual leavener and of easily leading to serious pedagogical pitfalls.