Skills
General Education programs are often expected to impart skills to students. Most obviously, there is often some sort of writing requirement within General Education. Increasingly, liberal arts education as a whole is urged to emphasize the skills that it imparts to students as well as the information that is transmitted.
There are a set of important skills that can only be transmitted through interdisciplinary education:
Interdisciplinary students learn how to integrate across conflicts (that is, when different people reach different conclusions). This is an invaluable skill in school, and work, and perhaps most obviously in our lives in Citizenship We discuss in Teaching Interdisciplinary Integration how strategies for integration can be transmitted. Note that most disciplines transmit dominant theories and methods and thus rarely if ever teach students how to cope with conflict. When they do confront conflicts they do not tend to impart the strategies identified by interdisciplinary scholars.
Students should learn also how to find relevant information across different disciplines (See Addressing Information Overload). We live in an interdisciplinary world, and often as workers and citizens need information from diverse sources. Disciplines by their nature do not teach students how to search widely, nor how to evaluate information from diverse sources. But texts on interdisciplinary analysis (again see Teaching Interdisciplinary Integration) necessarily do.
More generally, interdisciplinary education teaches students how to cope with the sort of complex problems that benefit from insights from more than one discipline.
There are also a variety of skills that are transmitted particularly well by interdisciplinary education:
Interdisciplinary students are guided to practice "perspective-taking": placing themselves in the position of others in order to understand others' point of view.
Integration is only possible once opposing views have been compared and contrasted. These are themselves important skills.
Though all disciplines teach critical thinking skills, interdisciplinary education exposes students to the simple fact that all theories and methods have strengths and weaknesses. It urges them to generally expect that all statements have some kernel of truth but generally also flaws. And it guides them to evaluate all statements in the context of the perspective of the author.
Interdisciplinary education informs students about how to communicate to different audiences.
By enhancing perspective-taking and communication, and also developing the ability to cope with complexity, interdisciplinarity also aids teamwork. Teamwork skills can be further enhanced by certain choices of Pedagogy that encourage students (and sometimes instructors) to work together.
By having students reflect on the perspectives and thought processes of others, interdisciplinarity encourages the important skill of self-reflection.
The various textbooks mentioned under Teaching Interdisciplinary Integration provide advice on how these various skills can be imparted. The two introductory texts cited there each devote chapters to discussing skill acquisition. Both, notably, relate the skills that interdisciplinarity encourages to the very similar lists of skills that employers seek.
We should stress that an important set of complementary Values are also associated with interdisciplinary education.