Thanks for the follow up comment. I think most concerns about poaching classes, stepping on disciplinary toes, and the like are displaced concerns about the future of the kind of limited and focused perspective that most disciplinary specialists offer.

I wonder if those of us who do interdisciplinary work sometimes misplace our worries. The future seems far more likely to be interdisciplinary than rooted in traditional disciplinary practices. In fact, critics of the modern university often single out the limited scope of disciplinary practices for derision. Moreover, administrators often see the limited scope and appear of many traditional disciplinary foci to be an inefficient model for undergraduate teaching. From my perspective, at least, smaller more nimble faculties can offer greater scope albeit at the expense of depth. Inter/transdisciplinary researchers find themselves with multiple pools of resources at their disposal as they can flit from field to field following the fickle flow of resources. Finally, one has to expect that transdisciplinary scholars will have an advantage in moving into administrative positions. The ability to understand efficiently the way in which disciplines relate to and depend upon one another is an important asset in administrative positions which are all, to some extent, interdisciplinary in scope.

This all being said, I think that it is important for us as inter/transdiciplinary folks to realize that the decline of traditional disciplinary specialization is not necessary a good thing. As a sometime dabbler in the interdisciplinary discourses of Classics, I can really appreciate just how much my field has depend upon high quality disciplinary work in philology, archaeology, epigraphy, and many other focused, careful, and disciplined, disciplinary practices.

The worry that I have, then, is not that transdisciplinary scholarship and teaching will be pushed to the margins, but that disciplinary work upon which it depends will be pushed to the side. After all, it’s appealing to see trans- and interdisciplinary scholarship as exciting, innovative, and able to move in leaps and bounds whereas old, stodgy, limited disciplinary work (as the popular perception) dwells on minutia, quibbles over insignificant details, and is mired in longstanding debates that appear far removed from pressing, contemporary concerns. The former appears, in this common formulation, and the latter as so much ivory-tower irrelevance. But as we both know the ivory-tower business is what allows those of us who dance around disciplines with wild and passionate abandon to make leaps, stay agile, and influence the future direction of the university.

The disciplines, I think, are ours to preserve.

Bill

Thanks for the comment! One thing that I’ve thought about more and more is how much interdisciplinary teaching takes place within existing departments. In other words, there is a growing group of people like Bret who do not see the department as defining or defined by a discipline. My suspicion is that this will happen more and more on university campuses and, in some ways, undermine the old departmental system in general. This is particularly true for those of us who study the ancient world. It’s natural to include and critique archaeological, philological, historical, and linguistic research in our efforts to understand the ancient world.

Of course a shift like this within disciplines will likely have negative consequences for programs like Interdisciplinary Studies which defines itself as a program (or a department in some places) that is distinct because it is interdisciplinary.

Keep an eye on Teaching Thursday over the next few weeks as we see more similar contributions.

Bill

Last month I had the privilege of spending some time pondering the insightful musings of Mark Taylor, professor of religion and author of the publication ‘Field Notes from Elsewhere’ (Columbia University Press, 2009). A former Integrated Studies student insisted that I read Taylor’s book, and so I was persuaded to set aside some time to honor that request. I found the book to be existentially rewarding mostly because of Taylor’s occasional meditations on hard lessons learned after 40 years of college teaching. I introduce Mark Taylor here because I want to bring one of his thoughts to this discussion on interdisciplinary teaching.

Taylor writes, “One of the greatest challenges of teaching is to convey the complexity of simplicity and the simplicity of complexity in a way that is accurate but understandable. Too many students want clear answers, and readers all too often look for quick fixes and simple solutions. But not everything can be boiled down to basics; there are no twelve-step programs for life’s most pressing problems. For explanations and examples to be effective, they can be neither too simple nor too complex, neither too concrete nor too abstract, The real, I believe, is not found on one or the other side of any divide but always lies in between. Learning this lesson is never easy–it requires time and patience. If teaching and writing are to trace the fine line of life, they must follow the elusive boundary where things simultaneously come together and fall apart–like chapters of a book that are not fragments yet do not add up to a whole” (Taylor, 199).