Suggestions for Interdisciplinary Teaching

Bill Newell provides a list of suggestions on interdisciplinary teaching. Instructors who pursue these practices and attitudes are more likely to foster interdisciplinary skills and attitudes among their students:

· Focus the course on a specific problem, issue, or question;

· Choose one that requires insights from more than one discipline to be adequately addressed;

· Be explicit about the interdisciplinary process you are using;

· Discuss the process in class;

· Identify the disciplines that offer distinctively different insights into the problem; Include disciplines with whose perspectives or insights you disagree as well as those congenial to your way of thinking;

· Clearly identify the perspective (whether of a disciplines, interdiscipline, or school of thought) from which each set of insights is drawn;

· Present the concepts and theories through which the insights were generated, not just the insights themselves;

· Probe the (often implicit) assumptions underlying each perspective in general, and its relevant concepts and theories in particular;

· Assume every disciplinary perspective has at least a kernel of truth;

· Look for strengths in arguments you dislike and weaknesses in those you like;

· Seek commonalities not compromises in creating common ground;

· Think inclusively (both/and) as well as dualistically (either/or);

· Embrace contradiction—ask how it can be both;

· Seek a more comprehensive understanding that is responsive to all perspectives but dominated by none of them;

· Value intellectual flexibility and playfulness;

· Model interdisciplinary thinking;

· Integrate as you go, not just at the end of the course;

· Let students in on what you’re trying to accomplish educationally; and

· Foreshadow and sum up so students don’t get lost in the process.

See also Bill Newell's Interdisciplinary Habits of Mind