Why and How to Be Interdisciplinary

Academe, May/Jun 2006 by Dalke, Anne, Grobstein, Paul, McCormack, Elizabeth

This Bryn Mawr program has a long track record of getting faculty members to talk across borders.

Interdisciplinary conversations are fast becoming a central feature of academic and intellectual life. We believe this revolution-in-progress, in which faculty engage in the once-fringe activity of figuring out how to do what we haven't been trained to do, offers an antidote to many of the ills of the discipline-focused academic tradition. It is invigorating disciplinary work and calling attention to broader patterns and new areas of exploration that we may not perceive if we look only from our own disciplinary perspectives.

Like all revolutions, the movement toward interdisciplinarity stems from unmet aspirations, and its justification and evolving practices remain a little inchoate. Because interdisciplinary research and teaching differ sharply from what we were educated to do. they can also he daunting. We offer here our own experiences to help persuade you to become a willing-perhaps even enthusiastic-explorer of interdisciplinary terrain.

Our essay reflects the different perspectives of a literary scholar, a biologist, and a physicist, as well as the voices of colleagues in other disciplines who have worked together under the auspices of the six-year-old Center for Science in Society at Bryn Mawr College (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/scisoc). By illustrating a blending of voices, we hope to show that meaningful interdisciplinary conversations can be productive and need not he difficult or abstruse.1

Productive Play

The Center for Science in Society was founded at Bryn Mawr in 2000 to encourage conversations among scientists and nonscientists about, among other things, "the relationships among forms of creativity and understanding." In such conversations, disciplinary training plays a critical role, but no single discipline can lay claim to special authority. Virtually all disciplines touch on such broad problems in one way or another, and all provide varying perspectives on them. When you use institutional support to bring faculty, staff, and students from different disciplines into an interdisciplinary conversation, surprises can resultpeople are willing to take chances, to engage in genuinely productive play.

Interdisciplinary work is indeed play, but play of the most meaningful kind. That many of us have reacted to what we've been doing together with a sense of pleased surprise suggests that productive work of this kind has been less common in academic life than it should be. We look forward to the time, now emerging, when the satisfaction of such extended intellectual engagements no longer strikes any of us as unusual.

A discussion that began in a center-sponsored brown-bag lunch several years ago illustrates the process we follow at Bryn Mawr. In a series on the culture of science, a computational biologist talked about some of his personal frustrations in making his own work understandable and useful to experimental and observational biologists. Because he aimed to determine the consequences of situations that might occur instead of collecting observations on the real world, his colleagues who study physical phenomena didn't understand what to do with his work.

Participants in this discussion came from biology, chemistry, English, mathematics, physics, and psychology departments; programs in computer science, gender studies, and the history of science; and the campus offices of resources and environmental health and safety. All of them recognized the frustration of the computational biologist-and described similar tensions in their own fields between broader, more synthetic efforts and more focused, concrete research. Historians, for example, noted that some of their colleagues eschew general stories and big narratives and draw conclusions only from looking at specific data, while others study larger patterns and approach data gathering from that perspective. Although everyone agreed that both approaches are valid, each researcher was used to working only one way.

What happened in our brown-bag conversation was complicated and exciting. Faculty members came to recognize that methodological difficulties in their own disciplines were not unique to them. Although each of our fields has its competing or complementary methods, as we talked with one another about broad issues of creativity and understanding, we learned to appreciate the perspectives of other disciplines and the alternate methodologies of our own. We all began to listen differently to our colleagues as a result.

General and Specific

We have continued over the years to discuss the nature and significance of the distinctions we identified in that early brown-bag discussion, uhich we refer to variously as metaphoric and metonymic, theoretical and observational, abstract and empirical, or general and specific. We've also hosted other working groups on topics such as information, diversity, quantification and value, science's audiences, and teaching and learning.