Towards Interdisciplinary Education

 

Satya Narayan Sardar

 

 

Some American universities started programs like “Computer Assisted Language Learning” which required people of letters to learn computers. Departments of Humanities offered masters program in Mathematics, claiming that mathematics is no longer a strictly bracketed discipline of the grandchildren of  Newton or Adam Smiths. Psychology was made compulsory by some medical colleges. In our own days, some universities in Nepal accept graduates from any discipline for their MA and MPhil program in English, and results show, such ‘hybrid’ scholars often come to toppers.

          This is interdisciplinarity. If we take stock of research methodologies, the idea of transgression of disciplinary frontiers become even clearer. Departments of literature are borrowing research methodologies from strict social sciences like anthropology, the best example coming from New Historicist research agenda, which itself is tied up with history and politics. Literature too is heavily informed by sociological and even statistical methods, while sciences like “environmental science” look at literature for  the very veracity of its physical, intellectual and aesthetic connection with human life. Medical students all over the world go for compulsory linguistic and psychological training, and this reflects the realization of the fact that social-scientific paradigms are as necessary to a medical student to fare well, as is practical science. In the recent times, BP Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, Dharan, has started organising annual seminars with an aim to connect medicine and humanities, and it invites scholars from various walks of life, including literature, music, theatre and social work to deliver their experiences or read out their research papers. This is indicative of the growing realization that interdisciplinarity is the call of the time, and there is no moving ahead, unless disciplines collaborate.

          This is to say, disciplinary conservatism is at stake, and the stake is most pronounced in the globalized world. Of all messages given by globalization, one of the most important ones is that no country, no academic discipline, no civilization, no political model of development, no market and no individual can stand alone; all is an outcome of give-and-take. The same is true for academic disciplines. Those disciplines that cannot loosen their boundaries to lend and borrow, are destined to fall into disuse. And those practitioners who do not make their understanding porous, are destined to become dinosaurs.

          Studies all over the world show a huge slash in the departments of humanities, especially literature, that still stick to their own ‘purist’ models of research. Nepali Department at TU, for example, can hardly enrol a score of admission in its postgraduate programme today. Department of Culture, Buddhist Study and History suffer the same fate. Bindesh Dahal makes a sharp observation:

The studies of humanities suffer as students opt to join other streams. That is why many colleges in Nepal are phasing out humanities. Similar trend exists in universities worldwide. It seems the focus has shifted to business and vocational studies, which is understandable. Gone are the days when gaining education meant being able to introspect and ask existential questions. These days one has to be ‘saleable’ in the market. Education that ensures jobs with lucrative benefits is held high. Deliberation on ontological and epistemological meanings is considered unproductive. One has to learn the tricks of the trade in this ever-growing capitalist market-driven society for survival. (1)

Besides several other probable reasons, one of them is that these departments have patterned their research on some strict model, and their graduates, when they come of the universities, experience eclipsed form many newer dimensions of knowledge necessary to survive in the modern world.

          The calls to redraw disciplinary boundaries are not new. As early as the turn of the eighties in the twentieth century, voices were raised to loosen the boundaries of disciplines. The call started from the departments of literature thanks to their overt theoretical engagements. Theorists, all over the world, expressed their discomfort in letting themselves confined to the walls of a certain disciplinary expectation, because the nature of knowledge itself is multifarious and non-conformist. Literature departments, accordingly, started drawing contents from environmentalism, politics, medicine and trauma, conflict and peacekeeping, gender concerns, journalism and mass communication, sociology and anthropology, computer science etc. Lisa R. Lattuca writes:

Many of today’s interdisciplinary scholars are more revolutionary in their ideas and ideals and are eager to interrupt disciplinary discourse and to challenge traditional notions of knowledge and scholarship. In the sciences and related professional fields, such as engineering and medicine, interdisciplinarity is still largely instrumental. There is also a good deal of instrumental interdisciplinary work in the social sciences and humanities and in professional fields such as education, business, and social work. However, an increasing number of faculty in the humanities and social sciences pursue interdisciplinary work with the intent of deconstructing disciplinary knowledge and boundaries. (3)

 

This shift in the choice of content in the departments of literature forced them to revise their research methodologies and agendas. Soon, literary researches became computational, psychological, medial, eco-critical, behavioural, sociological, linguistic, anthropological, cultural, genetic, and what not!!  This should start right from the school, which, sadly is not yet happening, because, in most of the cases, the schools have been repeating and reproducing an ideology that more or less sides with conservative regimes or dominant social norms. Selakovich says, “Schools are not revolutionary agents of change but tend to support the political, religious, and economic values which exist in the society” (141).

The imaginations of the children shaped by our schools, is what lasts lifelong. Tozen et al claim:

Schooling plays an important role in teaching and legitimating a society’s ideology. The ideology served by the public school is almost inevitably the dominant ideology of the larger society . . . Schooling prepares people to 02- 15 participate in a society’s political economy and share its dominant ideology, but by doing so, it may further disadvantage those from the less-advantaged groups while contributing to the already privileged position of the more powerful. (2002, p. 10)

Interdisciplinary approach to education has its own merits. It does the best trick to shape an individual into a global citizen, who is informed with almost all the basics, and is made adjustable with many, apparently strange, areas of knowledge creation and sharing through experiences and research. Kathy Hall analyzes the advantages of interdisciplinary education:

Education policies and practices would benefit from being informed by the full range of perspectives on reading and this in turn suggests a need for interdisciplinary dialogue among reading researchers, teacher educators, policymakers, and education practitioners. These interested groups need to share perspectives on reading development so that they can at least acknowledge, and where appropriate integrate, perspectives from the existing knowledge base into their research and professional practices. (4)

The evolution of such interdisciplinarity has put many of our erstwhile assumptions in quandary. There was a time when people called for specialists with in-depth training in certain disciplines and branches of knowledge. Today, it does not suffice for an individual to get bracketed within the limits of a specialist. It is equally imminent for individual to get the ‘minimum’ or the ‘fundamental’ or the interdisciplinary education, which comes from every quarter of episteme. This leads to the development of a new global citizen who knows ‘something of everything and everything of something’. It might sounds something like the imagination of a renaissance man, but this is a fact, and our academic institutions should strive towards the development of such individuals by revisiting their curriculum, and by walking out of the cocoon of purist disciplinary confinements.

          Curriculum is the avenue to start with. The modern-day curriculum should examine an transnational impact, and should thus work to revolutionize pedagogy to mould global citizens. E. Thomas Ewing writes:

Understanding revolution and pedagogy requires interdisciplinary and transnational approaches that lead to a reconsideration of the social foundations of education. The authors draw upon a variety of disciplinary perspectives—education, history, anthropology, gender studies, political science, and folklore—each of which position subjects and structures at the center of analysis. While focusing on specific geographical regions, chronological periods, and thematic subjects, these chapters all address a broader set of issues that transcend these categories of space, time, and content. The interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives thus inform and are located in each chapter, while the accumulated effect of the collection offers new insights into the relationship between revolution and pedagogy.  (12)

Disciplines should, therefore, question directions and dimensions of their missions. There are no directions—in spatial sense—around a body of knowledge and skill today. There also are no fixed dimensions; they are flexible, and can be added or slashed with the change of time. Who studies what is more a matter of time’s call, and not merely a question of interest, inclination and passion. Unless the minimum is acquired, a person is less likely to have the capability to converse with the fast-changing world. For that reason, interdisciplinary approaches to integrated knowledge have evolved and developed, and is likely to evolve further in the days to come. At a time when the globe is becoming a village, and diverse cultures have started colliding in the same metropolis of market to eke life out of their discordant noises, it has become a fundamental necessity for a global citizen to become a polyglot, a multifarious being, and a renaissance man, albeit of a small magnitude. This is in consonance with the claim made by New London Group: “Changes to our working lives, our public lives, and our personal lives demand that individuals be flexible, multi-skilled negotiators across languages, discourses, and cultures” (14).

          Interdisciplanarity is, therefore, not only a fashionable approach of the modern times. It also is a survival strategies that will keep institutions thriving, and individuals performing.

 

Works Cited

 

Dahal, Bindesh. “Decline of Humanities Education in Nepal.” 3 March 2014.  

< http://www.educatenepal.com/article_archive/print_it/407> Accessed on 17 July 2019.

Ewing, E. Thomas. “Shaking the Foundations of Education: An Introduction to Revolution and Pedagody.” In Revolution and Pedagogy: Interdisciplinary and Transnational Perspectives on Educational Foundations. Ed. Thomas E. Ewing.  New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2005. Pp. 1-18.

Hall, Kathy. “Significant Lines of Research in Reading Pedagogy.” Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Learning to Read. Ed. Kathy Hall et al. New York: Routledge, 2010. pp. 3-16.

Lattuca, Lisa R. Creating Interdisciplinarity : Interdisciplinary research and Teaching among University Faculty. Nashvile: Vanderbilt Universty Press, 2001.

New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” In Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge, 2000. pp 9–42.

Selakovich, Daniel.  Schooling in America. Social Foundations of Education. New York: Longman, 1984.

Tozer, Steven E., Paul C. Violas, and Guy Senese. School and Society. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.