There’s a lot of vitality and foresight in the way that many universities across the sector are designing new interdisciplinary education initiatives.
But given the considerable investment and the fiendish administrative complexity of facilitating new cross-institutional choices for students, we could do with some clarity of vision about the educative benefit to students, and importantly for staff as well.
Study between and across disciplines is not new. Programmes in the natural sciences, liberal arts and across the social sciences have flourished for some decades. But there is a particular species of interdisciplinary education that started in the early 2000s and is accelerating in the 2020s in a growing number of universities. It is organised as part of the undergraduate curriculum alongside single discipline or cognate-discipline programmes and brings students together from contrasting disciplines to tackle “real world” problems through specially designed “discovery”, “innovation” or “challenge-led” modules.
Last month’s conference on interdisciplinary education hosted by Anglia Ruskin University showcased a myriad of recent initiatives in the sector. While all of us are very often negotiating the very same barriers and internal debates that both Nicky King and Geraint Thomas highlighted on Wonkhe last year, we conceptualise what interdisciplinary education is going to mean for our students in different ways.
