Cracking
Capsules in Interdisciplinary Space
Or,
Why I Became an Educator
BY ARRI EISEN, SENIOR LECTURER IN BIOLOGY
One night during my first year of graduate school at the University
of Washington, I was working late, up on the sixth floor of an
old research building, Seattle's city lights outside the window.
As I was setting up my experiment, I had a sudden epiphany: I
realized that I knew nothing; I had learned nothing in college
to prepare me for what I was supposed to be doing. How to address
a scientific problem? How to design the right experiment? I felt
lost.
Looking back, I think that moment of realization is why I became
an educator. I wanted to make sure the same thing didn't happen
to others, if I could help it.
Why was I at a loss at that moment? On paper, I had done very
well at very good schools. I had learned a lot in college, but
it was almost all outside the classroom-day-to-day social and
societal stuff.
I just hadn't gotten much exposure to
thinking. Much of the problem in the classroom was (and still
is), I believe, the "encapsulation" of information,
or teaching in a vacuum. My classes were fragments, with their
interrelationships rarely pointed out to me. I was very good
at learning just the right information I needed for that class
and answering the test questions with that information, but more
often than not information wasn't presented to me in any real
context: How did this affect my life? Why and how is calculus
important?
"Interdisciplinary courses"--a favorite catch-phrase
among educators over the last few years--are at their best attempts
to break down this encapsulation of courses and their content.
Why does encapsulation exist? Historically, you could say, the
myriad capsules that constitute today's universities were more
or less all aspects of one great discipline, the philosophy of
ancient Greece. It's ironic that much of what interdisciplinary
courses are doing, gathering different capsules and dissolving
them in the same solution, is really trying to re-unify, to bring
us backwards so we can go forwards. The many fragments that broke
off from philosophy have increased our knowledge base enormously.
Along the way, though, we lost something. It was that something
that hit me that night at the lab-bench.
Two results of the fragmented system that have evolved bother
me and perhaps would bother Aristotle as well. One is the specialization
that places value on research in narrow, disciplinary ways of
thinking, with a seeming lack of awareness of how current research
and social paradigms are shaped by society. Certainly the intellectual
leaders in science today, the "best scientists" (and
I'm sure this is true of all areas), are people who can see the
big picture, who have moved outside the boundaries of their field
to view their work in a broader context. They are willing to
make connections across disciplines.
This brings me to the second issue about educational encapsulation
that bothers me: our students get an encapsulated view of the
world from us. It is so easy for our students to say "I
hate history" or "I hate math" without realizing
that the two are so interwoven that they are inseparable. How,
for example, did the world change with the advent of Newtonian
thinking? We should strive to give our students broad vision
from the beginning.
Clearly, there is a core collection of facts every teacher wants
his or her students to know, but what better way to get these
facts across than in the context of students' lives, of history,
ethics, politics, science? And within the context of problems
that challenge society? The trick is to integrate the core information
with contextual thinking and information. Otherwise, we wind
up with too many students who think poetry has nothing to do
with science, that music and sociology have nothing in common.
At Emory, we have made some progress toward richer learning in
a dynamic interdisciplinary environment. But the system still
works strongly against interdisciplinary teaching, because it
works against interdisciplinary research or even social interaction.
How many humanities and social sciences people have even been
in the Rollins building, where biology and physics are? How many
scientists have even been in the Callaway building?
Two big barriers: energy and the politics of fragmentation. We
are rewarded for publishing in the narrow journals of our field.
Interdisciplinary or even plain understandable books can only
be written by full professors who have "nothing to lose."
True and good interdisciplinary teaching takes energy and time,
time away from research and publishing. Somewhat ironically,
therefore, many, but certainly not all, folks who put energy
into developing such teaching are either lecture-track faculty
or established, full professors. This is not necessarily a bad
thing, and we should take advantage of these folks' expertise,
but shouldn't innovative teaching by our young, energetic assistant
professors be nurtured and as rewarded as it is rewarding?
I suggest two approaches. First, we should establish mechanisms
so that those who are working toward interdisciplinary goals
can be used as catalysts for developing interdisciplinary courses).
Second, the big one, is the institutionalization of an encouragement
and reward structure for participation in such activities at
all levels.
There's a myth that you must be actively conducting academic
research to be a good teacher. But I think it would be difficult
to argue with the idea that a course taught on evolution by a
historian, a geologist, a biologist, and an anthropologist would
lead to interdisciplinary discussion and, perhaps, even interesting
new research projects.
Finally, if we swallow any or all of the above, we have to ask
ourselves about our general education course menu of which all
our students must partake. Here is the perfect opportunity for
a solid foundation of interconnected knowledge. On the surface,
our current "new" curriculum may not serve students'
needs to address adequately big, interconnected problems like
global warming; however, it is the responsibility of those of
us who teach these courses, especially the freshman and senior
seminars (which may be our best avenue for enlightened interdisciplinary
courses), to teach outside our capsules. Think about teaching
a seminar with someone from another department with a different
perspective on your subject. Let's try and get our students thinking
critically across spectra, before they wind up in Ph.D. programs
at the bench, late at night, feeling lost.
Arri Eisen is director of the Emory College Program in Science and Society.