by Marion Brady
The Educational Forum, Volume 63, Number 3, Spring 1999
In
fairness to authors and readers, reviewers of scholarly books should make
clear the perspective they bring to their evaluation of a work. I come to
the task of reviewing Interdisciplinarity: Essays From the
Literature as a long-time critic of interdisciplinarity.
That said, I believe that advocates of interdisciplinary approaches to
curriculum bring a far more sophisticated perspective to the task of
helping the young develop useful mental models of reality than do those
who continue to think that exposing students to a random mix of academic
disciplines adequately educates.
What the authors of the essays in Interdisciplinarity share
is an awareness that the traditional, distribution-driven curriculum is
fundamentally flawed. That curriculum has no overarching aim except the
implicit one of passing along to the next generation the accumulated
knowledge of today’s experts in a few selected fields of knowledge. That
curriculum does not merely ignore the systemically integrated nature of
knowledge, it insists by its very organization that the integration of
seemingly disparate fields is not possible. That curriculum dumps on
students a volume of information far in excess of that which is
intellectually manageable. That curriculum treats the static assimilation
of existing knowledge rather than the dynamic creation of new knowledge as
the purpose of general education, thereby making itself increasingly
dysfunctional as the pace of change accelerates. That curriculum is so at
odds with how the brain ordinarily functions that students must be held
forcefully in place by threats and promises—laws, grades, social
expectations and other powerful extrinsic motivators.
Readers of Interdisciplinarity’s thirty-one
essays—contributions selected for use in a reader for the Institute of
Integrative Studies—will find these kinds of issues explored, but they
cannot help but be struck by the lack of agreement among
interdisciplinarians about strategies for dealing with them. There are
general suggestions for action, but those looking for guidance in
establishing or expanding interdisciplinary programs may come away from
the essays overwhelmed by the complexity of the task.
In an “Overview” co-authored by William H. Newell and William J. Green,
the difficulties are admitted:
“The term ‘interdisciplinary studies’ itself is so loosely and so
inconsistently used that almost any course which does not fit neatly
within disciplinary departments is apt to be labeled ‘interdisciplinary.’
Second, the liberal arts objectives of interdisciplinary studies are vague
at best; even where practitioners can agree on what they mean by the term,
it is unclear what they are trying to accomplish. Third, there are no
widely accepted canons of interdisciplinary scholarship by which to judge
excellence. Finally, it is not certain what the appropriate relationship
is between interdisciplinary study and the academic disciplines
themselves.”
These are serious problems. And when contributors throw into the mix the
terms “a-disciplinarity,” “crossdisciplinarity,” “multidisciplinarity,”
and “transdisciplinarity” (terms defined differently by different
essayists) the picture becomes even more confused.
This is not surprising. Given the raw materials with which the
interdisciplinarians are attempting to work—the academic
disciplines—confusion is inevitable. The traditional disciplines focus on
different kinds of phenomena, approach that phenomena with different
analytical and descriptive methodologies, have different aims, employ
different conceptual frameworks, use different vocabularies, operate at
different levels of abstraction. The disciplines did not take shape as
parts of a thoughtful effort to parcel out responsibility for describing
and analyzing the whole of reality, and they cannot now be made to mesh in
any logically coherent way. Even if some wise scholar could devise a way
to cobble them together, the result would surely be out of the
intellectual reach of students.
Most contributors to Interdisciplinarity appear to believe
that across-the-board integration of the disciplines is not possible. They
choose instead to search for useful disciplinary parallels and
intersections and bring them to bear on problems, themes, topics,
questions, issues, ideas, persons, historical periods, or regions. Readers
who find this rather random approach to the integration of knowledge
appealing will find in the book useful ideas, illustrations, and examples.
I am not one of those readers. In his introductory essay, editor William
H. Newell identifies the dissident group into which I fall:
“Transdisciplinists . . .take as an article of faith the underlying unity
of all knowledge. This assumption, that everything is related to
everything else, makes the division of knowledge otiose from the outset
and leads to the search for a superdiscipline . . .”
Newell sees a superdiscipline capable of logically integrating all
knowledge as a highly desirable but distant, perhaps unachievable, goal. I
see such a discipline as already in place, underlying all thought and
action. In our attempt to understand reality, we use just five “master”
conceptual frameworks — those for time, environment, humans, action, and
cognition. All descriptions and analyses are but elaborations of the
conceptual frameworks of these five or of their systemic relationships.
Those seeking an overview of on-going dialog within the interdisciplinary
community will find it in Interdisciplinarity; Essays From the
Literature. Those seeking guidance in establishing an
interdisciplinary program will probably be disappointed.
Marion Brady
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