Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures: A Model for Strength and Sustainability - Hardcover

Klein, Julie Thompson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470550899 ISBN 13: 9780470550892

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2010

Synopsis

Praise for Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures

"Klein's analysis shows convincingly that from research in the sciences to new graduate-level programs and departments, to new designs for general education, interdisciplinarity is now prevalent throughout American colleges and universities. . . . Klein documents trends, traces historical patterns and precedents, and provides practical advice. Going directly to the heart of our institutional realities, she focuses attention on some of the more challenging aspects of bringing together ambitious goals for interdisciplinary vitality with institutional, budgetary, and governance systems. A singular strength of this book, then, is the practical advice it provides about such nitty-gritty issues as program review, faculty development, tenure and promotion, hiring, and the political economy of interdisciplinarity. . . . We know that readers everywhere will find [this book] simultaneously richly illuminating and intensively useful."
—from the foreword by Carol Geary Schneider, president, Association of American Colleges and Universities

"Klein reveals how universities can move beyond glib rhetoric about being interdisciplinary toward pervasive full interdisciplinarity. Institutions that heed her call for restructured intellectual environments are most likely to thrive in the new millennium."
—William H. Newell, professor, Interdisciplinary Studies, Miami University, and executive director, Association for Integrative Studies

"In true interdisciplinary fashion, Julie Klein integrates a tremendous amount of material into this book to tell the story of interdisciplinarity across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. And she does so both from the theoretical perspective of 'understanding' interdisciplinarity and from the practical vantage of 'doing' interdisciplinarity. This book is a must-read for faculty and administrators thinking about how to maximize the opportunities and minimize the challenges of interdisciplinary programming on their campuses."
—Diana Rhoten, director, Knowledge Institutions Program, and director, Digital Media and Learning Project, Social Science Research Counsel

About this title

About the Author

Julie Thompson Klein is a professor of humanities in English and interdisciplinary studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She is past president of the Association for Integrative Studies (AIS) and former editor of the AIS journal, Issues in Integrative Studies. Klein consults widely both nationally and internationally and is the author and editor of many books, including Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice; Crossing Boundaries; and Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity. She is also associate editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Interdisciplinarity.

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), headquartered in Washington, D.C., is the leading national association concerned with the quality, vitality, and public standing of undergraduate liberal education. Founded in 1915 by college presidents, AAC&U now represents the entire spectrum of American colleges and universities―large and small, public and private, two-year and four-year. AAC&U comprises more than 1,200 accredited colleges and universities that collectively educate more than seven million students every year.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures

"Klein's analysis shows convincingly that from research in the sciences to new graduate-level programs and departments, to new designs for general education, interdisciplinarity is now prevalent throughout American colleges and universities. . . . Klein documents trends, traces historical patterns and precedents, and provides practical advice. Going directly to the heart of our institutional realities, she focuses attention on some of the more challenging aspects of bringing together ambitious goals for interdisciplinary vitality with institutional, budgetary, and governance systems. A singular strength of this book, then, is the practical advice it provides about such nitty-gritty issues as program review, faculty development, tenure and promotion, hiring, and the political economy of interdisciplinarity. . . . We know that readers everywhere will find [this book] simultaneously richly illuminating and intensively useful."
from the foreword by Carol Geary Schneider, president, Association of American Colleges and Universities

"Klein reveals how universities can move beyond glib rhetoric about being interdisciplinary toward pervasive full interdisciplinarity. Institutions that heed her call for restructured intellectual environments are most likely to thrive in the new millennium."
William H. Newell, professor, Interdisciplinary Studies, Miami University, and executive director, Association for Integrative Studies

"In true interdisciplinary fashion, Julie Klein integrates a tremendous amount of material into this book to tell the story of interdisciplinarity across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. And she does so both from the theoretical perspective of 'understanding' interdisciplinarity and from the practical vantage of 'doing' interdisciplinarity. This book is a must-read for faculty and administrators thinking about how to maximize the opportunities and minimize the challenges of interdisciplinary programming on their campuses."
Diana Rhoten, director, Knowledge Institutions Program, and director, Digital Media and Learning Project, Social Science Research Counsel

From the Inside Flap

Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures

"Interdisciplinarity" has become a mantra for change in higher education and is embodied in a rich variety of forms and practices that challenge how we think about knowledge, research, and education. Yet, despite widespread desire for change on campuses, proponents are often uncertain about how to go about planning, implementing, and sustaining interdisciplinary programs and projects.

Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures offers administrators, faculty, and planning groups a primer for interdisciplinary change with a portfolio of practical, concrete strategies for actualizing this change. These proven techniques are anchored in a conceptual framework that unites insights from organizational theory, higher education studies, and the literature on interdisciplinarity.

Creating campus cultures that enable rather than impede interdisciplinary work and thought requires a systematic approach to identifying current activities and interests, leveraging existing resources, benchmarking best practices, building capacity and critical mass, targeting strategic initiatives alongside generally loosening barriers, and creating a platform for higher levels of strength and sustainability. Topics also include criteria of program review, the interdisciplinary career lifecycle, and endowment building. These strategies are not meant as one-size-fits-all prescriptions for every campus or as universal formulas or sets of rules, but rather provide informed awareness of nationwide developments and lessons of theory and practice that will improve local decision making and implementation.

Sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures is an essential resource aimed at developing and maintaining institutional support for interdisciplinary work and giving campuses the tools needed to ensure that their work is successful and sustainable.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures

A Model for Strength and SustainabilityBy Julie Thompson Klein Carol Geary Schneider

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-55089-2

Chapter One

Mapping National Drivers of Interdisciplinary Change

Preparing for interdisciplinary change requires two mappings-the first national and the second local. Skipping to the second map shortchanges the answers to two of the three questions that are uppermost in the minds of faculty and administrators: What changes are occurring? and What is happening on other campuses? Shared awareness of the national picture will enable individuals to locate themselves within the larger landscape of higher education, reduce their sense of isolation, lessen ignorance and skepticism about activities in other areas, heighten awareness of the plurality of local activities, and foster a common commitment to easing barriers. This chapter presents an overview of major developments associated with interdisciplinarity today in science and technology, social sciences, and humanities.

The book adopts a root meaning of interdisciplinarity based on two authoritative definitions from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report, Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research (2004), and Klein and Newell (1997) in Handbook of the Undergraduate Curriculum. Interdisciplinary research (IDR) and interdisciplinary studies (IDS) integrate content, data, methods, tools, concepts, and theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge in order to advance fundamental understanding, answer questions, address complex issues and broad themes, and solve problems that are too broad for a single approach (Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, 2004; Klein and Newell, 1997).

The consensus meaning, though, is only a literal definition. The root term has many connotations, distinguishing a variety of goals and contexts that will become clear in this chapter. The differences are dramatically evident in disputes over what constitutes real or genuine interdisciplinarity. Awareness of the multiple connotations is not an idle exercise in etymology or history. Differences surface in local arguments for and against certain forms of interdisciplinarity. To help readers navigate the debate on meaning, this chapter also introduces a core vocabulary that can be used on campuses and ends with a summary statement of the conceptual vocabulary of the book.

Science and Technology

When scientists hear the word interdisciplinary some mention historical precedents ranging from the Greek philosopher Anaximander to Charles Darwin. By and large, though, scientists are inclined to cite modern developments in defense-related research during the 1930s and 1940s, especially the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. It was the first large government-funded example of IDR. In subsequent decades, IDR became part of the profiles of the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Scientists also tend to cite major discoveries and initiatives, such as x-ray crystallography and the human genome project. The current momentum is documented in a 2004 report from NAS. Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research identifies four primary drivers of IDR today (pp. 2, 40):

1. the inherent complexity of nature and society

2. the desire to explore problems and questions that are not confined to a single discipline

3. the need to solve societal problems

4. the power of new technologies

Drivers 2 and 3 are not new. However, they gained momentum in the closing decades of the twentieth century. The heightened profile of driver 3 was signaled in 1982, when the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development declared in The University and the Community (1982) that interdisciplinarity exogenous to the university now takes priority over endogenous university interdisciplinarity based on the production of new knowledge. The exogenous originates in real problems of the community and the demand that universities perform their pragmatic social mission. International economic competition in science-based fields of high technology propelled increased activity and investment from the late 1970s forward in areas such as engineering and manufacturing, computers, biotechnology, and biomedicine. Complex problems of practice in professional and vocational education have also fostered interdisciplinary approaches in law, medicine, social work, education, and business.

The National Research Council (NRC) tracked changes in a series of reports. In 1986, the authors of Scientific Interfaces and Technological Applications announced that almost all significant growth in knowledge production in recent decades was occurring at the interdisciplinary borderlands between established fields. The five prominent areas in fundamental research were biological physics, materials science, the physics-chemistry interface, geophysics, and mathematical physics and computational physics. The six outstanding areas of technical applications were microelectronics, optical technology, new instrumentation, the fields of energy and environment, national security, and medical applications. Four years later a new NRC report, Interdisciplinary Research (1990), tracked developments that were promoting increased collaborations between life sciences and medicine and between physical sciences and engineering. New intellectual understandings of biological systems, problem complexity, the costs of instrumentation and facilities, and the desire to transfer knowledge rapidly from laboratory to hospital practice have been strong catalysts for change.

These developments signaled a double form of boundary crossing between disciplines and commercial sectors, leading Rustum Roy to suggest that the more accurate term is not interdisciplinary but interactive research (2000). The escalation of boundary crossing between academic science and commercial sectors, in combination with recent discoveries in molecular and cell biology, prompted the National Institutes of Health to issue a new road map for research and funding in 2002. Collaborative teams, new combinations of skills and disciplines, a better toolbox, and new technologies are all needed to understand the combination of molecular events that lead to disease. The NIH has accelerated this trend with the aim of creating a new discipline of clinical and translational research capable of catalyzing new knowledge and techniques for patient care (http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/overview.asp; http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/clinicalresearch/overviewtranslational. asp).

Driver 4 is apparent in new technologies of molecular imaging, nanomedicine, and bioinformatics. In addition, new tools of quantitative and computer-assisted mathematical analysis also facilitate the sharing of large quantities of data across disciplinary boundaries in areas as diverse as medicine and the geosciences, the latter of which already experienced an interdisciplinary transformation in the mid-twentieth century fueled by the theory of plate tectonics. Driven by Web 2.0 technologies, information sharing across the infrastructure of distributed information is also enabling individuals and networks in dispersed locations to collaborate. The implications are not merely technical. In the journal Science, Alan Leshner (2004) observed that "new technologies are driving scientific advances as much as the other way around," allowing new approaches to older questions and posing new ones (p. 729).

In the midst of these major developments, the quiet daily flow of borrowing methods, concepts, and tools continues. The impact varies greatly, from auxiliary or supplementary borrowing to a degree of assimilation that is no longer considered foreign. Many physical techniques that originated in one discipline, such as spectroscopies, have become so fully integrated into biological research that their origin may be forgotten. Researchers also apply knowledge from one discipline in order to contextualize another, akin to the engineering profession's inclusion of social contexts of practice. When new laws comprise the basic structure of an original discipline, such as electromagnetics or cybernetics, a new domain takes shape. Methodologies of statistics, oral history, and econometrics were the foundation for other specialties as well, and other interactions led to the formation of new fields and hybrid interdisciplines such as biochemistry, cognitive science, and computational biology (Heckhausen, 1972; Boisot, 1972).

Another development, the emergence of new communities of practice, is part of a wider process of boundary work. Individuals and groups work directly and through institutions to create, maintain, break down, and reformulate boundaries between domains. The term trading zones arose in science studies to describe the heterogeneous interactions that give rise to new social and cognitive formations centered on common interests. These formations range from a pidgin zone, in the linguistic sense of an interim form of communication, to a creole zone, a new main subculture or native language (Galison, 1996; Star and Griesemer, 1989; Fisher, 1993; Klein, 1996). Interactions have been sources of continual advances in concepts and applications across the science of molecules and atoms, surfaces and interfaces, and fluids and solids. The current interface between physics and chemistry, for example, has been crossed so often in both directions that the authors of Scientific Interfaces and Technological Applications (1986) remarked "its exact location is obscure" and "its passage is signaled more by gradual changes in language and approach than by any sharp demarcation in content" (p. 53). As a result, Norman Burkhard reflected, the difference between a physicist and a chemist is no longer obvious: "Now we have chemists who are doing quantum-level, fundamental studies of material properties, just like solid-state physicists. There's almost no difference" (cited in Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, 2004, p. 54).

Three implications follow for thinking about the definition of interdisciplinarity, the nature of disciplines, and the curriculum. Taking definition first, much of scientific IDR today is instrumental in nature, in the sense that it is motivated by strategic or opportunistic goals (Weingart, 2000). Economic, technological, and scientific problems tend to take priority over epistemological motivations, aligning interdisciplinarity with mangerialism, commercialism, and entrepreneurism (S, 2005). The heightened profile of instrumental interdisciplinarity (ID) is linked with a historical shift in the performance of scientific research from individual investigators to multidisciplinary groups driven by external demands. Some research programs have grown so large that they are stimulating new understandings in multiple fields, evident in the wide impact of the theory of plate tectonics, global climate modeling, and the human genome project. IDR may also add value to traditional fields. Researchers in nanoscience, for instance, bridge several disciplines while using their nanoscience experience to open new disciplinary research directions and applications, such as incorporating nanostructures into bulk materials (Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, 2004).

As for the second implication, the argument for interdisciplinarity is often countered by a demand to protect the disciplines. Yet since the 1950s, many disciplines have become more porous and multi- or interdisciplinary in character (Bender and Schorske, 1997). Some domains, such as physics and biology, have also become so large and heterogeneous that they have been called federated disciplines. Specialization has a double effect. It reinforces fragmentation, but it also gives rise to connection and, in some cases, mutual interdependence (Winter, 1996). The inner development of the sciences has posed ever broader tasks leading to interconnections among natural, social, and technical sciences. The same object-an organism, for instance-is simultaneously a physical (atomic), chemical (molecular), biological (macromolecular), and physiological, mental, social, and cultural object. As mutual relations are reconsidered, new aggregate levels of organization are revealed, and multidisciplinary is becoming a common descriptor of research objects (Habib, 1990).

The third implication calls to mind the oft-remarked gap between new research and the curriculum. The gap persists, but Jerry Gaff (1997) likens scholarship to the molten mass of radioactive material that forms the core of the earth. Periodically it erupts in a volcano, or a shift in tectonic plates occurs. In accounting for interdisciplinarity in the science curriculum, Wubbels and Girgus (1997) report that faculty are incorporating new knowledge of genetics, cognition, and the solar system. They are organizing courses around complex technical and social problems and topics. They are also designing curricula that reflect the blurring of boundaries in contemporary research, including an introductory course integrating mathematics, physics, and chemistry; a joint biochemistry and biophysics program that integrates physics, chemistry, and biology classes; courses that teach general chemistry based on the context of physical materials; and project-based laboratories for general chemistry using lasers. Other reports add to the roster of examples. BIO 2010 (2003) offers a blueprint for bringing undergraduate education in biology up to the speed of contemporary research in an interdisciplinary curriculum that integrates physical sciences with information technology and mathematics with life sciences. Pellmar and Eisenberg's 2000 report, Bridging Disciplines in the Brain, Behavioral, and Clinical Sciences, presents models of interdisciplinary teaching and training at all levels, from undergraduate through postdocs.

More broadly, the NAS report, Facilitating Interdisciplinarity Research (2004), presents a series of recommendations for science education drawn from survey data, interviews, and literature review. The top advice for educators is to develop curricula that incorporate ID concepts, participate in teacher development courses on ID topics, and provide students opportunities to participate in IDR. The report also urges a multifaceted and broadly analytical approach to problem solving and revising foundation courses such as general chemistry to include materials that show how subjects are related to other fields and to complex societal problems. Favorable policies for team teaching are recommended as well, along with modifying core course requirements to allow more room for breadth and for team-building and leadership skills. Undergraduate students, for their part, are encouraged to seek courses at the interfaces of traditional disciplines that address basic research problems, courses that address societal problems, and research experiences spanning more than one traditional discipline. The top recommendation for graduate students is to broaden their experience by gaining requisite knowledge and skills in one or more fields beyond their primary subjects. Like faculty, they also need experience in using new instrumentation and techniques from other disciplines. Graduate students might also be admitted into broad fields, such as biological sciences and engineering, with no requirement for specialization until the end of the first or second year. Institutions, in turn, are urged to offer opportunities for students to work with and learn from students in other disciplines and with multiple advisers or dual mentors who contribute diverse perspectives on research problems.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0470550899
• ISBN 13: 9780470550892
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240