Practical Theories: Stem and Modern Education

Perhaps no more powerful concept seems to represent today's world than the In-ternet's tearing down of the borders of the nation-state. Even beyond the ability to engage in international commerce, images, and texts from within, otherwise-secretive regimes threaten tyranny, erase difference, and strive to unite us in common humanity. It is, then, only fitting that cutting-edge, modern, technologically savvy education thrives on tearing down disciplinary boundaries to see common goals and a greater purpose via individual strategies. Interdisciplinarity, the banner term for this revision of education, is often defined as the integration of existing disciplinary perspectives, sometimes combining disciplines, other times critiquing or transcending the disciplines, or both. It has many connotations, distinguishing a variety of goals and contexts. The differences are dramatically evident in disputes over what constitutes real or genuine interdisciplinarity (Klein, 2010). Although arguments over " authenticity " often run afoul of conceptual terminology, it might be best to begin with a focus on the obvious before moving into nuance. Interdisci-plinary research and interdisciplinary studies integrate content, methods, concepts, and theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge in order to advance fundamental understanding, answer questions, address complex issues and broad themes, and solve problems that are too broad for a single approach (National Academies, 2004). Given the immediacy of such a definition, it becomes apparent that, in practice, different types of interdisciplinary teaching can be identified: informed disciplinarity, synthetic interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and conceptual interdisciplinarity (Lattuca, 2001). In informed disciplinarity educators focus primarily on a single discipline but incorporate other disciplines to illuminate course content. Synthetic interdisciplinarity educators combine theories, concepts, and perhaps even research methods from different disciplines, but the contributing disciplines remain clearly identifiable. In contrast, transdisciplinarity mutes the disciplinary sources of theories and methods, applying them across disciplines so that they are no longer associated