Friday, February 5, 10:00 am–11:30 am
The Implications and Impact of Interdisciplinary Research and Education upon Disciplinary Ways of Knowing
Frangipani Room, IMU
Interdisciplinarity has become a mantra for change in the twenty-first century while at the same time notions of knowledge as a foundation or a linear structure have been disrupted by open source and social networks, the creative commons, and the web in general. The word appears in countless reports from professional associations, educational organizations, and funding agencies. It is also a keyword in strategic plans and echoes through the hallways as we attempt to describe knowledge and education across sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professions. Images of the curriculum follow suit, supplanting fragmentation and segmentation with integrating, connecting, linking, and clustering. In the past, disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity were treated as a dichotomy. Changes in research and priorities for education, though, challenge the simple metaphor of opposition.
This presentation explores the implications of these changes and focuses upon how we represent disciplinary knowledge today. State-of-the-art reports from disciplinary professional groups and accrediting bodies document greater complexity, relational pluralism, dynamism, and boundary crossing. Building and sustaining separate interdisciplinary programs and projects remains important. But, discipline-based curricula and program evaluation also need to be taken account of changes in what we know, what students should learn, and how we teach and conduct scholarship on teaching and learning.
Julie Thompson Klein is a Professor of Humanities in Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan (USA). She holds a Ph.D. in English (University of Oregon) and is past president of the Association for Integrative Studies (AIS) and former editor of the AIS journal, Issues in Integrative Studies.
Her numerous books include Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (l990), Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (1996), Transdisciplinarity: Joint Problem Solving among Science, Technology, and Society (coedited, 2001), and Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity (forthcoming). On the international front she represented the United States at an OECD-sponsored international symposium on interdisciplinarity in Sweden and at UNESCO-sponsored symposia on transdisciplinarity in Portugal and in France.
She has been a visiting or invited lecturer to Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and Russia. She was a member of the planning board for the Swiss National Science Foundations international conference in 2000 on transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability, and in 2003 delivered an inaugural address for a UNESCO Summer School in Uruguay on local development and environmental sustainability in Latin America.
