Collaboration between different subject areas is often important in responding to wicked problems. One thing I’ve noticed in talking and reading about education for wicked problems, is that the nature of the interaction between disciplines often isn’t explored in much depth. In the worst case scenario this can lead to different teachers each teaching their own discipline and students having to somehow make sense of bringing it all together. Here are some initial ideas about how the ‘inter’ in interdisciplinary learning might play out. I suspect this topic will need more posts in future!

Quite a lot of the papers I’ve read about interdisciplinary learning and teaching mention that interdisciplinarity involves some kind of synthesis that creates something that couldn’t have arisen from just one subject area. That’s not a bad starting point but it begs the question what do we actually mean by synthesis? Some of the broader work on interdisciplinarity also reminds us that friction, power plays and subordination can all be part of interdisciplinary work. So synthesis is only one of the possible forms of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinary learning might also involve questioning or challenging the assumptions and knowledge practices of a subject area, potentially leading to a rethink or expansion.

One possible approach to interdisciplinary learning focuses on making sure that everyone involved develops a shared understanding of key concepts like health, culture or sustainability. Language is inherently ambiguous and we work towards mutually shared understanding through dialogue within a shared frame of reference. This ambiguity is particularly strong when we consider big boundary crossing comcepts.The shared frame of reference might be a part of a wicked problem, such as how to reduce health inequality in a particular community. One way to approach improving shared understanding might be to have teachers and students all submit short definitions of a key term anonymously to a shared space as a starting point for comment. Then groups of students supported by teachers could develop a short text or map of what that means in relation to a particular case study.

Taking another angle on interdisciplinary learning, I like this quote from Watts and Tehrani (2020):

“creative writing has long been recognized as a dynamic platform for self-directed inquiry, one that allows authors to embed scientific concepts in the situated realities of their characters or speakers, i.e.,the physical, social, and technological contexts of their lived experience. In this way, authors have explored the implications of these scientific concepts and their interconnections with other ways of knowing.” (p. 31)

This gives a sense of how using the knowledge practices of one discipline (creative writing) might deepen understanding of another (one of the sciences). The process might even go further to challenge some of the assumptions that the sciences can make about what it’s possible to know and how it’s possible to go about knowing new things.

Continuing on the theme of knowledge practices, Gardner and colleagues write about the importance of learning the methods and tools of other subject areas as an important step towards developing new ways of knowing. One way to start this with more experienced students might be to get students in small interdisciplinary groups to each share a worked example of them using a method from their discipline. Students could then be asked to reflect on how they might use or adapt these tools in their home subject area. These kinds of conversations also make it easier for teachers and learners from different subject areas to surface and question the underlying norms and assumptions of their subject, which is essential for successful interdisciplinary work.

Photo by Zac Ong on Unsplash edited by Vel McCune