It’s become something of a commonplace to argue that undergraduate degrees need to become more interdisciplinary.
The disciplines are sometimes presented as siloes that artificially divide reality and prevent students from engaging with the real world, with all its messy, multifaceted problems that cannot be solved through any single lens. In this context, students are encouraged to engage directly with real-world problems, from plastic pollution to knife crime.
There are, as Nicky King recently pointed out in Wonkhe, a number of practical barriers in the way of initiatives that hope to make the undergraduate curriculum more interdisciplinary. These include many of the typical banes of the academic’s life more generally – timetabling, prerequisites, bureaucratic obstinacy.
But I would argue that we also need to think more carefully as educators about the conceptual questions that a problem-based, interdisciplinary curriculum throws up. Specifically, we need to be clearer about what we mean when we use apparently straightforward terms like “learn”, “problem” and “the real world” too casually.
