Is it possible to teach students to approach a topic in an interdisciplinary manner before they have even mastered the particular subject?
This is the question Professor of Philosophy Paul Kjellberg and Professor of Spanish Doreen O’Connor-Gómez—along with their colleague, University of Michigan philosophy professor Michael O’Rourke—sought to answer. Their research paper, “Interdisciplinarity and the Undisciplined Student: Lessons from the Whittier Scholars Program,” was published this past summer in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies.
Working with students in the Whittier Scholars Program from 2013 to 2017, their study focused on students who were juniors at the time. In the class, the professors facilitated the development of what they called “interdisciplinary consciousness.” The group worked with a total of five cohorts. The study involved a questionnaire meant to draw attention to the different unconscious ways people approach problems. This tool yielded interesting results.
“The main outcome was to provide justification for something most of us already knew, that undergraduate students are capable of thinking interdisciplinarily,” said Kjellberg. “Most of us at Whittier already knew that, but other people working in interdisciplinary studies tend to think of the mixing of disciplines as something that happens after students have acquired disciplinary expertise, not while they are in the process of developing this experience. It was a point worth making.”