HOW AND WHY TO TEACH INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH PRACTICE

This article addresses the interrelated questions of why it is important to teach students about the nature of interdisciplinarity and how this material might be best communicated to students. It is important to define for students what is meant by disciplines and interdisciplinarity. Having distinguished interdisciplinarity from the disciplinary approach, the advantages and disadvantages of each can be discussed. It is useful to discuss the history of both disciplines and interdisciplinarity. It is also useful to discuss the complex relationship between interdisciplinarity and other intellectual currents: postmodernism, unity of science, complexity analysis, feminism, and others. Critically, students should be guided as to how interdisciplinary research might be best performed. Some potential objections to teaching interdisciplinary research practice are addressed.

[1]  R. Szostak.  How to Do Interdisciplinarity: Integrating the Debate , 2002 .

[2]  Lisa R. Lattuca.  Interdisciplinary General Education: Questioning Outside the Lines (review) , 2001 .

[3]  Wayne W. Crouch,et al.  Evaluating Information: A Guide for Users of Social Science Research , 1980 .

[4]  Marcia Seabury.  Interdisciplinary general eudcation : questioning outside the lines , 1999 .

[5]  S. Turner.  What are Disciplines? And How is Interdisciplinary Different? , 2000 .

[6]  Rick Szostak,et al.  Classification, interdisciplinarity, and the study of science , 2008, J. Documentation.

[7]  Rick Szostak.  Interdisciplinarity and the classification os scholarly documents by phenomena, theories, and methods , 2007 .

[8]  L. Salter,et al.  Outside the Lines: Issues in Interdisciplinary Research , 1997 .

[9]  P. Aghion,et al.  Handbook of Economic Growth , 2005 .

[10]  Joan B. Fiscella,et al.  Disciplinary Hegemony Meets Interdisciplinary Ascendancy: Can Interdisciplinary/Integrative Studies Survive, and, If So, How? , 2005 .

[11]  R. Bone.  Discovery , 1938, Nature.

[12]  William H. Newell,et al.  Interdisciplinarity : essays from the literature , 1998 .

[13]  Arthur P. Young,et al.  Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate , 1998 .

[14]  Christopher R. Wolfe,et al.  INTERDISCIPLINARY WRITING ASSESSMENT PROFILES by , 2003 .

[15]  Rick Szostak,et al.  "Comprehensive" Curricular Reform: Providing Students with a Map of the Scholarly Enterprise , 2003 .

[16]  William H. Newell,et al.  13 Decision Making in Interdisciplinary Studies , 2006 .

[17]  Modernism, Postmodernism, and Interdisciplinarity , 2007 .

[18]  Lisa R Lattuca,et al.  Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching among College and University Faculty , 2001 .

[19]  Yu Su.  Classifying science: Phenomena, data, theory, method, practice , 2006, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[20]  Paul Cameron,et al.  Critical Thinking across the Curriculum. , 2002 .

[21]  Gerald Graff,et al.  Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education , 1992 .