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Main Article
Breaking the Rule of Discipline in Interdisciplinarity:
The Roles of Faculty, Students, and Staff in the Production of Knowledge
Alison Cook-Sather
Education Program
Bryn Mawr College
101 N. Merion Ave.
Bryn Mawr PA 19010
Phone: 610-526-5396
Elliott Shore
Chief Information Officer
Bryn Mawr College
101 N. Merion Ave.
Bryn Mawr PA 19010
Phone: 610-526-5270
Corresponding author: Alison Cook-Sather ()
Number of words in the entire document: 6,459
Date of submission: 17 May 2007
Breaking the Rule of Discipline in Interdisciplinarity:
The Roles of Faculty, Students, and Staff in the Production of Knowledge
Abstract
In this article we attempt to complicate traditional—and, we argue, limited and exclusionary—definitions of interdisciplinarity as the bringing into dialogue of established disciplines without questioning the parameters and practices of those disciplines. We propose that interdisciplinarity instead might mean teaching and learning among , between, and in the midst of those of innate or learned capacities—not only college faculty but also students and staff. To illustrate this more radical iteration of interdisciplinarity, we draw on a range of definitions of the key terms “discipline” and “faculty” and we offer a case study of a workshop we co-facilitated in which we brought differently positioned people together to engage in the educational process and the production of knowledge. We hope that this discussion contributes to efforts to expand notions and practices of interdisciplinarity.
Key words: faculty, discipline, role, education, knowledge
The move toward interdisciplinarity in the academy over the last generation has been a salutary one. It has recognized the limits of understanding in the sciences and of the human condition when one employs just one—however sophisticated and well-developed—set of practices, traditions, and ideologies that goes by the name of an established academic discipline. That the way one discipline studies literature might inform the way another discipline writes history, or that the view of the anthropologist might benefit the sociologist of science, or that the biologist and the physicist or the geologist and the archaeologist have things to say to one another is now a commonplace, almost no longer seen as requiring much comment or any justification. And it may be that some day in the not-so-distant future we embrace the interdisciplinary department, instead of creating “programs” with little status and less funding that segregate the work that lies in the interdisciplinary space. The recently deceased Clifford Geertz, who may have been the most influential anthropologist of our times and certainly the most quoted social scientist outside of his own discipline, became a great thinker without ever actually being disciplined into an anthropology department either as a student or in his academic career. He spent his entire adult life within structures at Harvard, Chicago, and the Institute for Advanced Study that were interdisciplinary at their very core. In him we have the example of what can happen when one is not constrained by a single discipline but rather thinks more widely and more freely, using tools and ideas that see the world of scholarship as a whole, not as a landscape broken up into narrowly conceived specialties. Maybe preservation of the disciplines that are the bedrock of the inter-disciplines is not so important after all.
But before we congratulate ourselves too much about how fortunate we are to live in a world that has rediscovered what many great minds throughout history have known—that to be truly well-educated one needs to spread a net as wide as it is deep—we contend that this definition of interdisciplinarity is only one half of the story and maybe, for the sake of the next generations of scholars, not the most important half. For the story we are telling ourselves about interdisciplinarity still locates the scholarly production of knowledge within a small band of disciples, the faculty, who, even if they start to be trained in interdisciplinary departments, are still more like one another than not in their habits of the mind. So even if we were to move to a world in which the academic discipline that is assumed to be crucial to the interdisciplinary space is replaced by a wider conception, we are still left with the fact that knowledge production remains in the hands of a like-minded faculty. Indeed, perhaps we only re-inscribe the notion of disciplines by admitting a wider group of ourselves into the congregation but not questioning the relatively homogeneous education of the individual believers. For we contend that diversity in the background and preparation of the people who teach and who learn needs to be extended in order to achieve real interdisciplinarity. We will argue first that it might be instructive to look at older meanings of the words “faculty” and “discipline” in order to rethink what a fuller conception of interdisciplinarity might look like and perhaps to reclaim some of the impulses that led to the current interest in reconnecting what once had been, at least in the early 19th century, a much more holistic approach to learning, hearkening back to the ways of such early U.S. institutions as the American Philosophical Society.
We do not use the word “congregation” lightly in the paragraph above, for one meaning of the term “faculty” has to do with religious status: “an authorization or license granted by an ecclesiastical superior to some one to perform some action or occupy some position which otherwise he could not legally do or hold” (OED online). That meaning predates the parochial U.S. American usage that defines “faculty” as the whole professoriate at a college or university. In Germany, when one uses the term Philosophische Fakultät, its commonsense meaning is still the people who work in all liberal arts disciplines, and includes not only what Americans would call the faculty, but the students and the staff as well. The original meaning of the term “faculty” had to do with the ability or the power to do something, either because of some innate ability or some acquired skill—a meaning that certainly assumes some kind of status, but not an exclusive one, or certainly not exclusive to the point of determining who is in the congregation and who is outside. “Faculty” derives from Latin and French root words that deal with doing and with being facile in the doing; “discipline” is derived from the Latin for a disciple—a pupil—and the instruction of a pupil. The original meaning of the noun “discipline” was “Instruction imparted to disciples or scholars; teaching; learning; education, schooling” (OED online).
We know that there are many other definitions for both of these words, and we will come to the rest of them in the concluding section. Our argument is not based solely on the derivation of words, reifying “original” meanings into eternal truths. But we are interested in reminding ourselves about what faculties and disciplines used to be about precisely because the move to interdisciplinarity seems, in our minds, to be a return, a reconsideration of the project of scholarship that is more integrated in ways that it may have been before the explosion of specialties in the 19th century. What would it mean for us to re-introduce these older meanings into the discussion of interdisciplinarity? What could faculty be doing when they put two or more disciplines together?
Let us be explicit in formulating our suggested definition of interdisciplinarity: We propose mixing “faculty,” a way of doing things well because of innate or learned capacities, “discipline,” teaching, instruction, or tutoring, and “inter,” between, among, amid, in between, and in the midst. We propose that interdisciplinarity practiced by a faculty should mean teaching and learning among and between and in the midst of those of innate or learned capacities. What would that look like in practice? The members of the faculty would not look like an exclusive congregation but rather would include all who have the ability to do things well—i.e., the students and the staff as well as the faculty—and the discipline that they would share amongst themselves would be the project of teaching and learning.
Interdisciplinarity in the sense that is widely shared in academe then, we contend, is not sufficient for the most generative re-imagining of learning and the creation of new knowledge in the liberal arts college. A further set of conversations is necessary to move beyond disciplinary parameters—and the roles people assume and are ascribed in relation to those—that can be re-inscribed by groups of like-minded, if disciplinarily diverse, academics working together across the traditional disciplines. The development of information technologies over the last decade can act as a catalyst for rethinking prevailing notions of interdisciplinarity and moving us toward the definition of interdisciplinarity for which we are arguing here. We have seen it in action, and drawing on our experience of co-facilitating a workshop in which questions of technology use prompted deeper questions about knowledge, authority, teaching, and learning, we argue in this essay for a form interdisciplinarity that is not the work solely of faculty members working across traditional disciplinary boundaries but occurs instead when the staff and students in the institution are as fully engaged as their faculty colleagues—and in similar ways—not only in the production of knowledge but also in the process of education.
The premise of much interdisciplinary work seems to be that by bringing multiple, different branches of knowledge, each with a set of structures and rules, into dialogue with one another, education and the learner herself can be informed from numerous angles. But the problem we see with this way of thinking about interdisciplinarity is that it leaves unquestioned the very notion of a set of rules that circumscribe a doctrine and define practice—thinking and action. Thus, our main argument is that we want to get back to the root of “discipline” as a commitment to a process of learning rather than accept the contemporary meaning of it as a body of knowledge with clear parameters and practices; we want to get back to and move forward from the roots of the term that call for engaging in a process of learning, gaining facility with ideas and practices and with ways of thinking without becoming locked into—disciplined into—clearly delineated boundaries. We want to argue for learners—faculty and staff as well as students—becoming facile enough within a prescribed set of practices that they can move beyond them rather than become more deeply ensconced within them. For these reasons, we are interested not in multiplying the already established disciplines that come into dialogue as the result of many interdisciplinary efforts but rather in multiplying the people who are variously positioned within institutions of higher education so that they can contribute to the production of knowledge and to the process of education.
If we define interdisciplinarity not as bringing together and reifying, even through dialogue, fixed disciplines, but rather as bringing into dialogue differently positioned people with the goal of drawing on disciplines to create something new, then we are raising questions about who has a legitimate perspective on and valid input into what constitutes knowledge. By arguing that students and staff are among those who can contribute to a robust and forward-moving array of ideas and practices, we are arguing for education as a process of change (Dewey, 1916), evolution, and translation (XXX, 2006). We are arguing for ever new versions or iterations of conceptions, identities, and practices, not reinscriptions of existing ones. We are arguing that the boundaries and structured sets of practices associated with roles that people generally play within higher education need, like disciplines themselves, to be productively complicated, blurred, or redefined.
Interdisciplinarity Differently Defined: A Case Study
To illustrate what we mean by multiplying the differently positioned people who might contribute to the production of new knowledge and the process of education, we offer a case study of a workshop we facilitated three times between 2000 and 2002. In the spring of 2000, we and two other colleagues designed this workshop with the goal of bringing together professors, students, librarians, and information technologists to explore their roles and how to work together to integrate technology into teaching and learning. Called “Talking toward Techno-Pedagogy: A Collaboration across Colleges and Constituencies,”[1] the workshop supported nine teams each June during three consecutive summers. Each team was composed of a faculty member, a rising junior, a librarian, and an information technologist. Issuing from eight small liberal arts colleges and one large research institution, participants spent four days together planning how they would collaborate in revising one of the professor’s courses through or with technology. Our premise was that each of the four members of the team had expertise and a legitimate perspective in this collaboration and that by talking together they could begin to break down some of the divisions and hierarchies in traditional college settings. Teaching and learning is structured generally in terms of disciplinary knowledge, in terms of role in teaching and learning, and in terms of what is learned and done. We hoped, in the workshops, to both embody and point to new forms of interdisciplinarity (see XXX 2006 and 2001 and XXX 2001 for related discussions).
The workshop consisted of multiple forums and conversations spread out over the four days. One was small, constituency-based, break-out groups, which offered participants an opportunity to talk across colleges with people who share their institutional role. A second was presentations and small group discussions with experts from a range of educational contexts (e.g., small liberal arts colleges, large state universities, distance learning programs) who were not members of any of the teams but had extensive experience with exploring teaching and learning with technology. They offered participants insights into and inspiration about working collaboratively to integrate technology into teaching. A third forum was formal, whole group discussions and informal conversations at lunch and dinner, which gave participants an opportunity to discuss themes and issues that arose in a less structured and more spontaneous way. Finally, teams worked in college-based groups to practice and plan their collaboration. Through each of these forums each team developed a draft of a proposal for their continued collaboration at their respective colleges.
Through these forums, faculty members were challenged to share their syllabi with other faculty as well as with people from different college-based constituencies. They were also challenged to rework that syllabus—and thus, to some extent, their conceptions of their disciplines—through collaboration. Librarians and information technologists were challenged to participate actively in the redesign of a course syllabus rather than simply to offer support once it was completed, if at all. Such active participation contributed to the conceptions and practices of the discipline that the course embodied. Students were also challenged to be active contributors to the redesign of a course—colleagues in rather than recipients of the professor’s labor.
Because all participants were coming from clearly established disciplines and embodying traditionally defined and delineated roles, working together in new ways and with new goals necessarily required them to clarify their understanding of their own or others’ assumptions. Over the course of the workshop, they began to imagine and pursue different possibilities for their roles and relationships, to question their assumptions about and enactments of particular roles, and to imagine and begin to enact a different form of interdisciplinarity. We weave their words into the following portion of our discussion, deliberately identifying from which role each participant speaks, to illustrate how these differently positioned people brought their faculties to bear on the creation of knowledge and the process of education.
Simply having time and space to clarify traditional roles and their relationships to disciplines in the commonly used sense led quickly, according to one librarian, to “the recognition that emerged in the minds of different groups about what it is that the others do and what they have to offer each other.” This clarification entailed perceiving the delineations of roles, but it also included rethinking some of those delineations as, another librarian explained, “myths and stereotypes were broken down.” This is not a fast or simple process. Many of the challenges, another librarian suggested, “stem from of a lack of communication” as well as the need for exploration of what each constituency’s “contribution to teaching is and could be.” Reconsiderations of what people do and have to offer, of myths and stereotypes, and of who can contribute to teaching and learning are reconsiderations that can lead to revisions of knowledge production and of the educational process. Given the fact that faculty members are traditionally considered the sole purveyors of knowledge production, they must lead the way toward, as one professor put it, the realization that “all of these wonderful ideas can come to fruition without me doing and being everything.”