How do you define interdisciplinary education?
It depends if you care about undergraduate or graduate education…
With Doctoral education, the goal is to have depth in something so the biggest piece is learning how to effectively communicate and collaborate across disciplines.
For those who want to sit at a crossroads it’s about being able to take things from each discipline and not be naive.
For undergrad / masters level, students are being taught in a single discipline, without recognizing the differences in disciplines. Helping students navigate the heterogeneity from different disciplines. Another piece is helping them understand how a narrow topic connects to the broader world. They are learning a particular way of thinking about the world, but that world connects to other worldviews. And they need to integrate multiple worldviews
How do you describe your teaching “field?” (as in research field)
I teach population ecology, and I start off by telling the students what they already know. Let’s back up and look at all the different sub disciplines. It’s not an interdisciplinary course, I’m not teaching in that way, but presenting it in the way about “how do we use this to make decisions?”
I’m a population ecologist, but I’m attracted to interdisciplinary collaborations because it’s fun to hear from multiple perspectives. But for many environmental problems, there needs to be a social or economic component
With the grizzly bear reintroduction in CA, we want to look at the higher level of human decision making and wildlife management. Basic science is motivated more by questions than answers, and applied science is motivated more by answers.
I am a basic scientist in that I am motivated by questions, and I try to inform applied answers.
What creates a successful interdisciplinary education experience?
One view on what we could do (not a consensus of faculty), the notion that our PhD students have to develop depth in a particularly narrow area which will be their dissertation. But any PhD student has to do that, and they should have some breadth that puts their narrow work into a discipline. But there are more and more scholarly contexts that include multiple disciplines and on top of that there are emerging disciplines. We want any PhD student to have that.
One thing we can add at the Bren school is to teach the students what they need to know in order to be effective collaborators. Understanding that other disciplines have other ways of thinking about the world, cultural differences, different values and incentives. Getting a core understanding of that challenge and making them clear so the group can work through them and transcend them. That information can be expressed at a theoretical level, but the Bren school could have it at the experiential level.
