Journal

Journal

Since I have done the tech support for this course once or twice, I was aware going into this course as a student that the topic of interdisciplinarity is a vast forest with many forking pathways for the mind to wander. It can be challenging and is indeed challenging for me to navigate this forest and keep myself on the path. I find myself getting lost and having to find my way back to a path through the thickets and vines. In other words, there are so many different variations, interpretations, and definitions of interdisciplinarity that it makes my head spin. I can say for sure, though, that my practice is undoubtedly not interdisciplinary whatsoever. At best, it is slightly multidisciplinary (Beane, 1997) if you count the many sub-disciplines of Computer Science. For example, my Web Programming course borrows topics and ideas from the Basic Programming, Networking, and Security courses. I question, then, does reference knowledge from prerequisite courses in a program count as being multidisciplinary? To indeed have interdisciplinary education in Computer Science, students must first have solid fundamentals and disciplinary expertise.

However, I can say that while my practice is severely lacking in interdisciplinarity, I am trying to make up for that with the constructivist (Powell & Kalina, 2009) pedagogy I've learned from this program. Borrowing from (de Waard, 2019), social constructivist pedagogy can almost be seen as a prerequisite to interdisciplinary education. Can interdisciplinary learning occur if students are not collaborating and speaking with one another?

The proposed taxonomy (Lattuca, 2001) and levels of integration (Haynes, 2002) helped to orient me, especially after the in-class activity of analyzing a CEGEP program and evaluating where it ranked using those frameworks. I love frameworks because my mind has an affinity to hyper-categorize and put every little thing into a nicely labelled box. I understand that it is not that easy when it comes to interdisciplinarity. I find myself questioning: is one of the goals of interdisciplinary teaching to blur the lines between the disciplines?

Speaking of nicely labelled boxes, I realized that the program approach could be thought of this way. This approach segments education into silos where students are trained to think and problem-solve using a specific perspective. It was enlightening to learn about the themed approach (de Waard, 2019) that Amsterdam University college used to implement interdisciplinarity from the bottom up heavily. Since our CEGEP system did not consider interdisciplinarity from the start, I think it will be a challenge to try and implement bits and pieces of it here and there throughout the programs. For example, the current extensive Science program revision includes a Computer Science course as a requirement. There are many questions about the way this will be implemented that will affect the level of interdisciplinarity, such as:

  1. Will the two faculties speak to each other heavily during this process?
  2. Who will teach this course - CS teachers or Science teachers? Or both?
  3. What will the learning objectives for the course be?
  4. Will the assessments and instructional strategies used in the course complement a Science student's perspective?

I see this integration being hard to implement well. The study by (Lindvig, Lyall, & Meagher, 2019) states that creating interdisciplinary education in an already monodisciplined institution requires looking at the gaps, or interstices, between the disciplines. The question then becomes, is it a good idea to look at the interstices between Science and Computer Science when planning this program revision? There are so many aspects of these two programs to consider, and I already find it overwhelming to work on my pedagogy in my courses!

References

References

Beane, J. A. (1997). A special kind of unity. In Curriculum integration: designing the core of democratic education.
de Waard, M. (2019). Theme-Based Teaching and Interdisciplinary Learning: A Case Study at Amsterdam University College, the Netherlands. In M. Nishimura & T. Sasao (Eds.), Doing Liberal Arts Education (pp. 47–59). Singapore: Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2877-0_5
Haynes, C. (Ed.). (2002). Innovations in interdisciplinary teaching. Westport, CT: Oryx Press.
Lattuca, L. R. (2001). Creating interdisciplinarity interdisciplinary research and teaching among college and university faculty. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Lindvig, K., Lyall, C., & Meagher, L. R. (2019). Creating interdisciplinary education within monodisciplinary structures: the art of managing interstitiality. Studies in Higher Education, 44(2), 347–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2017.1365358
Powell, K. C., & Kalina, C. J. (2009). Cognitive and social constructivism: Developing tools for an effective classroom. Education, 130(2), 241–250.