Interdisciplinary Education Quotes

another obstacle to educating innovators in universities is the lack of respect for interdisciplinary inquiry, practical knowledge, and applied learning. Discipline-based, in-depth knowledge is important, and basic research makes significant contributions to innovation. It is essential to our future that we continue to support this kind of inquiry, but this cannot—and must not—be the only kind of knowledge that is valued by our universities and our society.

While the universality of the creative process has been noticed, it has not been noticed universally. Not enough people recognize the preverbal, pre-mathematical elements of the creative process. Not enough recognize the cross-disciplinary nature of intuitive tools for thinking. Such a myopic view of cognition is shared not only by philosophers and psychologists but, in consequence, by educators, too. Just look at how the curriculum, at every educational level from kindergarten to graduate school, is divided into disciplines defined by products rather than processes. From the outset, students are given separate classes in literature, in mathematics, in science, in history, in music, in art, as if each of these disciplines were distinct and exclusive. Despite the current lip service paid to “integrating the curriculum,” truly interdisciplinary courses are rare, and transdisciplinary curricula that span the breadth of human knowledge are almost unknown. Moreover, at the level of creative process, where it really counts, the intuitive tools for thinking that tie one discipline to another are entirely ignored. Mathematicians are supposed to think only “in mathematics,” writers only “in words,” musicians only “in notes,” and so forth. Our schools and universities insist on cooking with only half the necessary ingredients. By half-understanding the nature of thinking, teachers only half-understand how to teach, and students only half-understand how to learn.

To be truly successful over the long run, however, we must focus on how we train our workforce, with a heightened emphasis on interdisciplinary education. We can never promote coordination and teamwork by educating in silos and being hostage to professional prerogative.

Disappointingly, at precisely the point where church-related colleges and universities ought to display a countercultural communitarian impulse, they generally mirror the radically individualistic tendencies of the rest of American culture. Thus, they do not realize in any exceptional way the kind of peaceable polity described by St. Augustine: “a perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and of one another in God.”5 Irrespective of their rhetoric, Christian colleges and universities in practice seldom if ever resemble anything like the commonwealth of which St. Augustine speaks, wherein all are “united in fellowship by common agreement as to what is right and by a community of interest.”6 To the contrary, on these matters church-related colleges and universities all too easily reflect the character of the wider culture and thus fail to embody imaginative, faithful alternatives in which community simpliciter, and Christian intellectual community in particular, are in evidence. The familiar results include hyperspecialization that is not only content with but also prides itself on interdisciplinary irrelevance and inaccessibility; fragmentation of the curriculum; faculty disinclined toward conversation about common educative aims and curricular priorities; and students confirmed in their untutored, careerist, and consumerist impulses. In short, Christian educational institutions exhibit a failure to acknowledge and cherish our mutual interdependence, an aversion toward the hard work of finding common ground and arguing contested points, and resignation to lives and ideas torn asunder from the joys of serving a shared, mutually enriching good.

The Rapid Reflection Force (RRF). Simply put, the RRF is an interdisciplinary group charged with assisting the incident commander “grasp and confront issues raised by unconventional situations.”127 Lagadec describes the RRF as …a spur that will prod crisis leadership to keep moving, keep thinking, never indulging in trench warfare against unconventional disruptions—as such events will instantly overwhelm or turn round all attempts to draw static lines of defense or restore intellectual comfort zones. With this objective in mind, the critical weapon in the RRF’s arsenal turns out to be insightful questions, rather than preformatted answers, which are the building blocks of artificial certainty, the Trojan horses of instant collapse.128

Collaborative teacher teams are teams of educators whose classes share essential student learning outcomes; these teachers work collaboratively to ensure that their students master these critical standards. The structure for teacher teams could include grade-level, subject/course-specific, vertical, and/or interdisciplinary teams.

Here are ten facts about IQ. These facts are debated and often controversial among the general public but far less so among scientists who study intelligence. The best review of the academic literature supporting these facts is a 2012 paper by Richard Nisbett and colleagues – an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars, household names within intelligence research, comprised of psychologists, an economist, a behavioral geneticist, and a former President of the American Psychological Association. Their areas of expertise include cultural and sex differences in intelligence, the effect of social and genetic factors that affect intelligence, the development of intelligence over the lifespan, the relationship between economic development and intelligence, and changes in intelligence over history 1. IQ is a good predictor of school and work performance, at least in WEIRD societies. 2. IQ differs in predictive power and is the least predictive of performance on tasks that demand low cognitive skill. 3. IQ may be separable into what can be called ‘crystallized intelligence’ and ‘fluid intelligence’. Crystalized intelligence refers to knowledge that is drawn on to solve problems. Fluid intelligence refers to an ability to solve novel problems and to learn. 4. Educational interventions can improve aspects of IQ, including fluid intelligence, which is affected by interventions such as memory training. Many of these results don’t seem to last long, although there is strong evidence that education as a whole causally raises IQ over a lifetime. 5. IQ test scores have been dramatically increasing over time. This is called the Flynn effect after James Flynn (also an author of the review mentioned above), who first noticed this pattern. The Flynn effect is largest for nations that have recently modernized. Large gains have been measured on the Raven’s test, a test that has been argued to be the most ‘culture-free’ and a good measure of fluid intelligence. That is, it’s not just driven by people learning more words or getting better at adding and subtracting. 6. IQ differences have neural correlates – i.e. you can measure these differences in the brain. 7. IQ is heritable, though the exact heritability differs by population, typically ranging from around 30% to 80%. 8. Heritability is lower for poorer people in the US, but not in Australia and Europe where it is roughly the same across levels of wealth. 9. Males and females differ in IQ performance in terms of variance and in the means of different subscales. 10. Populations and ethnicities differ on IQ performance. You can imagine why some people might question these statements. But setting aside political considerations, how do we scientifically make sense of this? Popular books from Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994) to Robert Plomin’s Blueprint (2018) have attributed much of this to genes. People and perhaps groups differ in genes, making some brighter than others. But humans are a species with two lines of inheritance. They have not just genetic hardware but also cultural software. And it is primarily by culture rather than genes that we became the most dominant species on earth. For a species so dependent on accumulated knowledge, not only is the idea of a culture-free intelligence test meaningless, so too is the idea of culture free intelligence.

In a word, something is well integrated when it is no longer the focus of attention.