By Arvind Lodaya and Vijayan Immanuel
The challenges facing us such as the UN’s SDGs are complex and defy conventional disciplinary expertise. While conventional disciplinary domains have undoubtedly yielded valuable insights, they tend to foster specialisations within their respective silos, often hindering the exploration of broader and more integrated knowledge frameworks. It is increasingly clear that a more integrated approach in education and research is imperative—armed with new-age competencies such as collective learning, design thinking, computational thinking, and complex problem-solving. It is against this backdrop, universities must prioritise broad-based learning and exploration of new knowledge at disciplinary intersections to foster a transformative shift to interdisciplinary competence.
Interdisciplinary Competence
A well-accepted definition of interdisciplinary competence is, “The capacity to integrate knowledge and modes of thinking in two or more disciplines or established areas of expertise to produce a cognitive advancement – such as explaining a phenomenon, solving a problem, or creating a product – in ways that would have been impossible or unlikely through single disciplinary means.” (Veronica Boix Mansilla, Professor, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education)
The NEP’s thrust on ‘multidisciplinary education’ is a welcome change. We need to take the momentum further toward disciplinary intersections. Unlike multidisciplinarity, which is additive, interdisciplinarity is integrative. It is the aspect of integration that separates a multi-disciplinary approach, where a problem is addressed by several disciplines in parallel, from an interdisciplinary approach, where disciplinary knowledge is integrated into a common understanding. This integration or synthesis of knowledge from disciplinary intersections is seen as the defining characteristic of interdisciplinarity. Let us take a look at some examples of this.
Interdisciplinary Courses
The first space for innovation is, of course, the introduction of courses that are truly interdisciplinary in letter and spirit – not the tokenism that usually passes for it. One such course is ‘Visualising Data for Storytelling’, one that combines fundamentals of statistics, data science, information design, and persuasive communication. This course, jointly offered by the specialties like Computational and Data Sciences and Liberal Arts and Design Studies, are now being co-taught by these disciplines at some universities. Faculty from both schools co-teach this course and jointly assess student performance. Student work comprises poetic and artistic visualisations along with a generation of datasets and statistical analyses in order to provide precise and customised visualisations, rendered in engaging narrative forms. The intention is to bring faculty and students from different domains to work together on co-creating interdisciplinary learning experiences. This is a key success factor.
Interdisciplinary Architecture
Programs have been launched with built-in Major and Minor option options that nudge students to seek and find complementarity in their choices and expose them to the potential of original research and concepts that are interdisciplinary. For instance, students who choose to major in Psychology and minor in Design are perfectly poised to explore (through mandatory ‘integrative projects’) the vast potential of ‘Behaviour Architecture’ which is finding great currency in government and public policy spaces. Students who major in Data Science and minor in Finance are of course ready to jump into the booming areas of decision sciences or blockchain. Besides application areas like these, there is also exciting potential interdisciplinary research areas, even at the undergraduate level, a novel provision in the NEP.
Conclusion
In this new interdisciplinary paradigm, universities have a crucial role to play in the creation of new knowledge. They can create an environment that encourages collaboration, facilitates interdisciplinary programs, and supports interdisciplinary research initiatives.
Embracing interdisciplinarity is not without its challenges, as it requires institutional support, interdisciplinary collaboration platforms, and a shift in the mindset of educators, researchers and students. Government bodies must encourage universities to explore these new paths and not be bound by the traditional compliance and regulatory mindset. The rewards are immense. With interdisciplinary competence, we can unlock new realms of knowledge, spark innovation, and make significant strides toward building a better future for all.
Prof. Arvind Lodaya is a Professor of Design & Prof. Vijayan Immanuel is the Vice Chancellor at Vidyashilp University, Bengaluru.