Self-Actualization

One goal of General Education is self-actualization: We want students to reflect on who they are and what their goals in life are.

Interdisciplinarity encourages students to evaluate conflicting arguments and integrate the best parts of competing arguments into a more holistic understanding. It thus prepares students to reach their own conclusions regarding the issues of the day. [See Teaching the Conflicts]

Our colleagues at Norfolk State University have a project in their Interdisciplinary Studies program in which students produce a video regarding personal identity. In this they outline how their personality integrates racial, class/occupation, education, family and many other dimensions of existence. The important point here is that each individual is multi-faceted and must integrate different aspects of their existence into a unified whole. Students are better able to consciously do so if familiar with the general idea of integration [See Teaching Interdisciplinary Integration] Such an exercise can be part of a course on interdisciplinarity itself or some other Thematic Interdisciplinary Courses.