Understanding the Scholarly Enterprise

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 that access to other majors is necessary to illuminate 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.

Yet an interdisciplinary general education can provide answers to even more basic questions, such as "What is a discipline?" and "What is interdisciplinarity?" Students and instructors can only appreciate the nature of the contemporary university if they can answer these questions. [See 1. Defining Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity, Understanding their History]

These understandings allow us to comprehend and indeed “map” the scholarly enterprise as a whole. Each discipline can potentially be placed on a multi-dimensional map of the phenomena we collectively study, the types of theories we collectively use, and the dozen or so methods (broadly defined) employed by scholars. Disciplines sometimes overlap on such a map. And there may be useful combinations of (relationships among) phenomena, theory, and method that are ignored by all disciplines. But each phenomenon, theory type, and method is engaged by some discipline. Students and instructors need not draw such a map in order to appreciate that there is some important degree of coherence within the scholarly enterprise as a whole. [This sort of map is discussed in some detail in Allen Repko, Rick Szostak & Michelle Buchberger, Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies, 2^nd ed. 2016, Thousand Oaks: Sage.]

Yet this coherence has not been the result of any plan. Rather, disciplines have evolved through time, each taking on new research questions as they evolve. Students can usefully be exposed to some of the history of disciplines and interdisciplinarity. [Again, see 1. Defining Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity, Understanding their History]

If we believe that scholarship does and should inform public policy decisions then understanding the nature of the scholarly enterprise is important for Citizenship

Interdisciplinary scholarship suggests that all disciplines have strengths and weaknesses. This insight can be usefully complemented with some philosophy of science (that proof or disproof is impossible, but that consensus can be achieved through amassing argument and evidence), and a bit of STS scholarship on the public role of science. See Designing a General Education Curriculum.

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.