Envisioning interdisciplinarity: Processes, contexts, outcomes.

Abstract

Interdisciplinary scholarship is a growing, but little understood, academic enterprise. How do college and university faculty pursue interdisciplinary teaching and research--how do they combine or transcend disciplines? how do they perceive institutional and professional contexts for interdisciplinary scholarship? what are the outcomes they attribute to interdisciplinary scholarship? To understand scholars' approaches to interdisciplinary teaching and research, this study explored the processes, contexts, and outcomes of interdisciplinary scholarship. Thirty-eight college and university faculty members from four institutions described interdisciplinary experiences ranging from informal conversations to teaching and research projects. In describing their teaching and research projects informants implicitly defined interdisciplinarity. Some conceptualized interdisciplinarity as the integration of disciplinary perspectives. Others described interdisciplinarity as the juxtaposition of disciplinary perspectives, suggesting that critique and conflict, as well as connection and coherence, characterized interdisciplinary scholarship. These descriptive accounts demonstrate that both disciplines and interdisciplinarity are personal constructions and that these constructions are not independent of one another, but rather epistemologically intertwined. Examining the questions that motivated interdisciplinary research and teaching aided understanding of interdisciplinarity. Four types of questions emerged in the study and were arranged in a typology of interdisciplinarity. The categories of the typology were informed disciplinarity--questions that require outreach to other disciplines; synthetic interdisciplinarity--questions that link disciplines; transdisciplinarity--questions that cross disciplines; and conceptual interdisciplinarity--questions without a compelling disciplinary basis. Findings related to processes, contexts, and outcomes were reported. The basic processes of interdisciplinary work--reading, talking, teaching, conducting research--resembled those of disciplinary work. Disciplinary and institutional contexts, typically portrayed as barriers, appeared less influential than often suggested. Informants pursued interdisciplinary work in varying academic contexts and attained a variety of professional rewards. Intellectual outcomes reflected epistemological commitments. For informants motivated by postmodernism, feminism, and/or critical theory, interdisciplinarity challenged disciplinary tenets and disciplinary identities; for other informants, interdisciplinary projects were consistent with disciplinary paradigms and therefore did not test disciplinary tenets or identities. The implications of these findings for future research, as well as for administrative practice in higher education, are considered.