General/Integrative Knowledge

A key motivation for general education is a belief that students should understand how their 'major' fits within the broader scholarly enterprise. Interdisciplinary education has some obvious potential for doing precisely that. It can put a student's major in perspective by showing how the major illuminates one aspect of a complex problem, issue, or situation but access to other majors is necessary to illuminate other interrelated aspects critical to understanding the whole. It can show students how other disciplines bring different perspectives to the same subject matter, and how insights from these different perspectives might be integrated.

· The DQP report stresses that students need to know how to connect the information from various courses they take; this prepares them to draw connections in their jobs and lives as citizens. We would stress that only an interdisciplinary education can meet this goal. Students need to be provided with guidance on how to integrate insights from different disciplines. This is a task that cannot be left to students on their own.

· The CM report emphasizes the value of general knowledge. Yet there is nothing in CM about understanding the scholarly enterprise itself. This is not only a valuable Gen Ed goal in its own right, but essential to the goal of democratic citizenship if we are to imagine that scholarly insights are important inputs into democratic decision-making. Students should be given some exposure to the contours of the scholarly enterprise: the different subjects that are addressed by different (but often overlapping) fields of inquiry, and the different theories and methods and types of data employed.

· Students should all know a bit of philosophy of science (that proof or disproof is impossible, but that consensus can be achieved through argument and evidence), a bit of STS scholarship on the public role of science, and appreciate that all disciplines, theories, and methods have both strengths and weaknesses. These points are or should be stressed in courses about interdisciplinarity.

Repko, Interdisciplinary Research, 2011, 35 has a quote from the American Council on Education on how students should be exposed to how different colleges and departments are related to each other.

Stefan Collini in What are Universities for? (Penguin 2011) quotes favorably from Cardinal Newman that the most important thing for students to acquire is “the perspective they have on the place of their knowledge in a wider map of human understanding,” and notes that university programs do not achieve this goal.