Unpacking the interdisciplinary mind: Implications for teaching and learning

As 21 century science and engineering assault disciplinary boundaries towards addressing problems in healthcare, the environment and energy, many engineering departments are seeking ways to make the curriculum and the classroom more interdisciplinary. Areas as diverse as drug delivery systems, green waste treatment plants, and skin injury treatments are all instances where chemical engineering principles have been applied to pressing problems beyond the purvey of traditional chemical engineering. However, while many faculty readily embrace inter and multidisciplinary research programs, replicating boundary crossing in the classroom remains challenging, if not contentious. Often, faculty educated within single engineering sub-specialties are not convinced that interdisciplinary approaches are appropriate to the undergraduate level. Graduate school, they contend, is where students can extend and expand their disciplinary horizons. Undergraduate education is for solidifying the fundamentals. Thus, most courses and faculty rely heavily on slow-to-change textbooks that drill the fundamentals while sustaining mono-disciplinary approaches to engineering education. Further, the oft-cited need to “cover” a certain amount of material serves as another major deterrent. This call for coverage is dictated both by the textbooks and by the curricular needs of the follow-on courses. However, the rarely cited issue with coverage is that it is not synonymous with learning; in fact, some might argue that coverage is the enemy of deep conceptual understanding, the desired kind necessary for retention and future application. But undoubtedly, the biggest hurdle to making engineering classrooms more interdisciplinary is the paucity of models for doing this effectively and the numerous questions that need to be addressed in the design of interdisciplinary learning environments. When do you start----early or late? What form should the classroom take? Does interdisciplinary learning need new pedagogies, new learning spaces that defy the large lecture hall, in short, new class configurations? What kinds of measurement can actually get at interdisciplinary reasoning and problem solving? How do you help faculty get comfortable with the idea that students should be given a window on current science and engineering, not just the fossilized versions found in textbooks?