The essays in this issue explore interdisciplinarity in the classroom and/or education.
Our first contributor argues that making the economics curriculum more interdisciplinary corrects some common
American misconceptions about Africa and encourages students to develop a richer understanding of
both economics and Africa, while also teaching students that Africa need not be relegated merely to economic
development courses and instead shows how Africa, particularly the Swahili Coast, was both inventive and
innovative.
In our second contribution, three authors writing together explore the power of storytelling in interdisciplinary
learning communities, or cohorts of first-semester students enrolled in general-education classes that connect
through a common theme. The authors detail how they developed their learning community around storytelling,
while also arguing that interdisciplinary learning communities grounded in storytelling are high-impact
practices that help students connect to their school community, classes, and to each other and to see their
learning as relevant in their lives.
Using two classification schemes (Biglan’s disciplinary classification scheme and Holland’s hexagon of occupational
interests and personality characteristics) that are relevant for understanding collaborations between
disciplines in multidisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary education to analyze disciplinary collaborations in education,
our third contributor measured the correlation between the two classification systems to determine the
relationship between them. Based on the study, the author argues the two classification schemes and their
relationships provide helpful frameworks for understanding disciplinary similarities and differences, while also
providing important insights about how members of collaborating disciplines may complement or differ with
one another
