22 Interdisciplinarity: Greater than the Sum of its Parts

What does it mean to be an “interdisciplinarian”? In 2012, I was confronted by this question as a new UA graduate of interdisciplinary studies . When I searched for jobs and contemplated my next steps, I questioned what my degree had prepared me for. I wondered, did employers see my training in interdisciplinary studies as an asset? Would my cross-disciplinary curiosity and wide breadth of knowledge be perceived as valuable to the organizations I hoped to work for, or was my lack of specification seen as a shortcoming compared to my more specialized peers? While I cannot say it was the path of least resistance — it has been a decade of fruitful work, study, and research — I still retain confidence that being an interdisciplinarian is an asset. There is a need for intellectually flexible thinkers who can work across fields, industries, and populations, and a need for problem solvers who can think beyond boundaries and work collaboratively. In other words, we need interdisciplinarians.

So what exactly is “interdisciplinarity”? Is it the same as “multidisciplinarity”? Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to education and research are similar in that they encourage us to view an issue or topic from multiple disciplinary perspectives. They both fall under the larger umbrella of cross-disciplinary approaches and share the assumption that when we look at questions and issues from multiple viewpoints we allow for a richer understanding than would have been possible if only a single discipline was drawn upon. Yet while both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches encourage us to use information, data, techniques, tools, concepts, theories and insights from two or more disciplines or bodies of knowledge to create a deeper understanding, they differ in their emphasis on integration.

Integration, in this context, can be thought of as the process of evaluating varied disciplinary insights and creating common ground among them in order to construct a more comprehensive understanding (Repko et al.). While integration is central to interdisciplinarity, this is not the case for multidisciplinarity. A multidisciplinary course might introduce different disciplinary insights, but not attempt to draw connections between them. In contrast, interdisciplinary approaches place importance on systematically bringing together, or integrating, varied disciplinary insights in order to understand issues, address problems, and create new solutions that extend beyond the scope of a single discipline. In summary, multidisciplinarity is an additive approach to understanding, and interdisciplinarity an integrated approach.

To help illustrate this idea, Choi and Pak compare multidisciplinarity to a “salad” (359-360). Like a salad, multiple ingredients are being brought together, each adding a new “taste” to our overall understanding. However, as is the case in a salad, each ingredient remains separated and easily identifiable. For example, an instructor might invite guest speakers across disciplines to discuss each of their roles in addressing a problem or community concern. Or an engineering student might take a class in disability studies to learn about formal and informal accessibility considerations. In doing so we are encouraged to view the topic, theme, or issue from multiple perspectives or viewpoints, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding. However, the emphasis is not on the integration of insights.

Like many other universities, general education at UA has historically been multidisciplinary, designed to introduce students to various academic fields and disciplines beyond their selected major. As an undergraduate student myself, I remember taking Gen Ed courses such as psychology, race relations, Latin American film, nutrition, and even dance. And yes, the methods, theories, and concepts I learned within these varied courses did encourage me to think more broadly and beyond the confines of my own disciplinary silo (physiology at the time, and later changed thanks to these very Gen Ed classes). However, the goal was not to bring different fields and courses into conversation. For example, I was not encouraged to consider how the methods, concepts, and theories I learned as a “nutritionist” might enrich my understanding of race relations, or how a dancer and stage artist might create a performance to communicate and advance the ideas embodied in a historical film. Each of these courses was essentially a distinct “ingredient” in my general education learning salad.

In contrast, the new Gen Ed curriculum, which you have the benefit of experiencing, takes an interdisciplinary approach. Imagine we were encouraged to bring together our knowledge and learning from seemingly unrelated courses and fields like nutritional sciences and race relations. Might utilizing scientific methods to collect and analyze nutritional information — while guided by social-scientific frameworks and research practices that explain how power and inequity operate in society — result in new insights on the ways in which nutritional disparities exist within communities? What if we then drew on our knowledge of qualitative methodologies, such as interviews and focus groups, to bring in the voices and lived experiences of people working in these fields or encountering these issues? In doing so we are able to approach a problem in ways that would have been impossible or unlikely through single disciplinary means. Interdisciplinary approaches such as these, which draw on and integrate the tools and ways of knowing of different fields, provide new perspectives on problems and encourage more comprehensive solutions and understandings. Creating a new policy or program to address nutritional gaps that is informed by integrating these multiple insights and perspectives is likely to be more effective than if we approached the problem and solution from any one of these insights alone. It is for this reason that when we engage in interdisciplinary work the outcome is greater than the sum of its parts.

Works Cited

Repko, Allen F., et al. Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies. Second ed., Sage Publications, 2016.

About the author

name: Megan Baker

Megan Baker, a Tucson native, is a PhD candidate in the College of Education and a graduate research associate for the Honors College. Beyond her work at the university, Megan is a trustee on a nonprofit board dedicated to environmental sustainability. The inherent complexity involved in both educational innovation and carbon mitigation efforts requires knowledge, expertise, and insights that go far beyond Megan’s reach. Learning to work on a team and see issues from multiple perspectives has been essential to this work.