Teaching and Learning in Interdisciplinary Higher Education: A Systematic Review

Interdisciplinary higher education aims to develop boundary-crossing skills, such as interdisciplinary thinking. In the present review study, interdisciplinary thinking was defined as the capacity to integrate knowledge of two or more disciplines to produce a cognitive advancement in ways that would have been impossible or unlikely through single disciplinary means. It was considered as a complex cognitive skill that constituted of a number of subskills. The review was accomplished by means of a systematic search within four scientific literature databases followed by a critical analysis. The review showed that, to date, scientific research into teaching and learning in interdisciplinary higher education has remained limited and explorative. The research advanced the understanding of the necessary subskills of interdisciplinary thinking and typical conditions for enabling the development of interdisciplinary thinking. This understanding provides a platform from which the theory and practice of interdisciplinary higher education can move forwar

Temporary Anchors, Impermanent Shelter: Can the Field of Education Model a New Approach to Academic Work?

Through a discussion of three pedagogical instances--based on classroom discourse, student writing, and program development--the authors examine education as an academic field, arguing that its disciplinary practices and perspectives invite interdisciplinarity and extra-disciplinarity to bridge from the academy to issues, problems, and strengths beyond it. Interdisciplinarity--understood as temporary “groundlessness”--emerges as a means to apprehend and respond to problems that in the context of past frustrations and failures may seem insurmountable; the willingness to not-know inspires new paradigms, experiences, and relationships. Extra-disciplinarity highlights the many chords running between academe and the rest of the world. Using this framework, we discuss the featured pedagogical instances as small-scale models for changing the power structures that have historically silenced some perspectives and knowledges, thus opening these structures to new inputs and connections. We conclude that while this work has no guarantees and is never complete, we must keep trying to connect beyond our academic disciplines and ourselves, both to learn and to more effectively impact the world

Shared Landscapes, Contested Borders: Locating Disciplinarity in an MA Program Revision

It is not unusual to consider a discipline spatially as a space defined or touched by a particular characteristic or force (Wardle and Downs, this collection, emphasis added). This conceptualization makes visible the metaphor at play here: territories are demarcated and differentiated from neighboring environments by borders that can be more or less visible. In this chapter, we use our experience as faculty members invested in a substantive revision of an MA program revision to explore how that process of delineation opens up new questions about disciplinarity. We sought to create a generous curricular space within an MA degree, one that accounted for our own disciplinary expertise, the needs and interests of our students, and the vision of our university. As we did so, we were also constructing a curricular map of what Rhetoric and Composition looks like in the locus of situated, locally responsive, socially productive, problem-oriented knowledge production that MA-granting institutions might provide (Vandenberg and Clary-Lemon 2010, 258)

Dysacademia in the Ivory Towers: Performativity, Discipline, Control & Chaotically Moving Towards the Shadows of the 3Rd Educational Spaces

This theoretical inquiry is based upon an archaeological and genealogical deconstruction of the character, utility and state of being of the modern university in the United States. In introducing Dysacademia as an apt metaphor for today\u27s dysfunctional academy, the current discursive analysis describes the various affects and effects that neoliberalism, performativity, discipline, and control have had upon the inorganic institutions of higher learning, and upon its primary subject concerns, the organic constituents known as the professoriate and the student body. As a follow up to this Ivory Tower deconstruction, a reconstructive enunciation is shaped using a conglomeration of postmodern, open systems,chaos, and poststructural theories to highlight the recursive potential that philosophy, cultural studies, and popular culture contain for opening undetermined and turbulent spaces that hold the promise and potential to expand the University\u27s undertakings regarding learning, culture, social engagement, critical epistemology, and authentic and reflexive ontology

The Postdisciplinarity of Lore: Professional and Pedagogical Development in a Graduate Student Community of Practice

Recuperating Composition’s lore in postdisciplinarity in order to illustrate the polyvalent, multidirectional positionality of our practices, this study argues that Composition’s lore, as it functions in a community of practice, helps locate and address various challenges with the cultural displacement that burgeoning scholars experience as they critically negotiate their practices within the expectations of the academy. Bridging the communities of writing teachers in classrooms and writing centers in a demonstration of institutional polyvalence, this ethnographic study’s participants suggest the reflexive influence of postdisciplinary lore in the cultivation of authority and practitioner identity. As one point of access to this cultural negotiation, the transmission and application of myth contextualizes lore as cultural phenomena affecting both professional and pedagogical development in graduate student teachers and tutors. This study concludes that the reflexivity offered in postdisciplinary sites of cultural engagement encourages a negotiated, recursive power relation between the institution and the practitioner, thus creating multiple, malleable sites of authority and agency within disciplinary culture

Dysacademia in the Ivory Towers: Performativity, Discipline, Control & Chaotically Moving Towards the Shadows of the 3Rd Educational Spaces

This theoretical inquiry is based upon an archaeological and genealogical deconstruction of the character, utility and state of being of the modern university in the United States. In introducing Dysacademia as an apt metaphor for today\u27s dysfunctional academy, the current discursive analysis describes the various affects and effects that neoliberalism, performativity, discipline, and control have had upon the inorganic institutions of higher learning, and upon its primary subject concerns, the organic constituents known as the professoriate and the student body. As a follow up to this Ivory Tower deconstruction, a reconstructive enunciation is shaped using a conglomeration of postmodern, open systems,chaos, and poststructural theories to highlight the recursive potential that philosophy, cultural studies, and popular culture contain for opening undetermined and turbulent spaces that hold the promise and potential to expand the University\u27s undertakings regarding learning, culture, social engagement, critical epistemology, and authentic and reflexive ontology

Disciplinary articulation in rhetoric and composition

This dissertation examines how nomenclature and the act of naming shapes disciplinary identities for scholars and teachers of rhetoric and composition. The discipline is named differently by many of its members, sometimes called composition studies, writing studies, composition and rhetoric, rhetorical studies, or rhetoric and writing. The different conceptualizations of the discipline invoked by the names point to a sense that the field is unstable, although this instability is not inherently negative. I argue that the differences in how we articulate our understanding of the discipline through the names we choose for it show that the disciplinary ground remains unstable and that our disciplinary identities continue to require further (re)defining. However, this disciplinary instability may be the chief strength of rhetoric and composition, making it a field that adapts to changes in epistemological and institutional circumstances. The project, a contemporary disciplinary history, engages in metadisciplinary inquiry by focusing on the development and progression of rhetoric and composition as an intellectual endeavor from the mid-twentieth century to the present. I rely on textual analysis of scholarly and curricular materials such as conference programs, academic journals, program descriptions, and dissertations; these sources enable me to examine how the discipline is articulated in both implicit and explicit ways. Descriptions of doctoral programs, for instance, illustrate different methods of privileging certain perspectives of the field, usually through the core curriculum that program architects have agreed are vital training for incoming members of the discipline. The multitude of disciplinary names suggests a lack of consensus among members of the discipline regarding how the boundaries of the discipline are defined, generating what I call disciplinary identity discomfort, a revision of Massey's notion that our identities are in crisis. I posit that disciplines, and thus disciplinary identity, are formed by a tension between two forces: epistemological and institutional. Epistemological pressure is exerted within the discipline by scholars whose work establishes or challenges the boundaries of research deemed legible to other members of the community. External groups, such as university administrations, accreditation organizations, and legislative bodies, exert institutional pressure that shapes disciplines as well. Institutional pressure is especially important to the historical development of rhetoric and composition because of the continuing perception of literacy in crisis, leading to popular and legislative calls for increased instruction in reading and writing (and to what Mike Rose calls "the myth of transience"). Decisions about the institutional placement of rhetoric and composition (within English departments, independent writing programs, or communications departments, for instance) also inform disciplinary identity, as well as legislation about literacy or funding for research in the humanities. A discipline is thus the product of a complex interaction between scholars and teachers who attempt to create coherent, if varied, intellectual spaces for their work and social and political influences, both local and national