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Wednesday, February 17, 2016

See the big picture

Get your heads out of those subject-specific cubbyholes and look around you for a broader vision.

If you go far back enough into the history of any discipline, you’ll come to a point where it merges in a vague way with other disciplines, where it seems to have existed as an idea in more than one space before breaking out into its own. The new discipline is born out of a gap or an overlap between two older ones, addressing questions or problems that either of the older ones could not. In the initial phases of this new discipline or field, there’s a lot of exchange of ideas across different areas. People come in and go out of it, bringing their perspectives and enriching the new area. But as this new field grows, it develops rules and procedures of its own, building walls that separate it from other fields, even those it originally grew out of.
Interdisciplinary approach
Most modern education systems encourage us to think within these disciplinary boundaries, at least for a large part of our schooling and early college. Very few programmes give us the space to explore the fuzzy spaces between disciplines, or to approach a problem from a variety of perspectives. It takes us a long time, often only when we get to a research degree — or in some cases, the rare postgraduate degree — to be exposed to interdisciplinary approaches. Of course there are the token “theme-based” projects in school that attempt to bring different subjects together under the umbrella of a topic. But more often than not, these end up showing us a variety of ways to look at the same thing rather than trying to explore a synthesis or a combination of perspectives — which is what interdisciplinarity is all about.
But what does an interdisciplinary way of thinking has to do with day to day life? Of what use is it outside research labs and higher academics?
In truth, the way we do things outside academics is essentially interdisciplinary. We mix up various bodies of knowledge to carry out the tasks of daily living, but we do it subconsciously, our focus being the task and its completion. Our basic understanding of physics, chemistry and biology is brought into how we deal with materials in the kitchen while what we know about human behaviour and economics is applied to bargaining in the market. Of course, we might argue that this is nothing but common sense… but isn’t common sense, at its core, the application of a wide range of knowledge to practical situations?
Interdisciplinary thinking is just a little more complex than this. It can work both at the level of defining the problem — the way in which we understand it — and at the level of finding solutions to it. Sometimes the process of understanding the problem or the situation will itself suggest a way of solving it. The more complex a problem is, the more likely it is that the solution will need an interdisciplinary approach. That’s why you will find people from many different fields working together on large issues such as climate change, public health, international peace keeping attempts, or urban planning. It’s true that these issues also need a deep understanding in a specific discipline, but the key to the solution lies in combining expertise from many fields, and this is where an interdisciplinary mindset becomes crucial.
So the specialists who work on these issues also have a sense of the limits of their own fields and the possibilities of other fields. It’s like a having a telescopic view — you pull back sufficiently to see how different ways of thinking fit together to help form a complete picture. This is different from deep disciplinary learning, which gives you a microscopic view, with more and more clarity about details.
An interdisciplinary mindset is also about openness. It’s about not getting locked into one way of thinking or doing, and being able to draw from different, often unusual, areas to address a situation.
To address today’s big problems — disease, homelessness, depleting resources, environmental degradation, violence and social unrest — we need different ways of thinking. We need to stay connected to the wide range of subjects that we are exposed to in school, at least in some minimal ways, so that we stay aware of these possibilities of understanding the world in different ways.
An art historian has a lot to learn from materials science (the composition and history of differencat compounds used in creating art work, where they were used and how), while someone who studies the spread of disease in cities needs to understand the culture and social structure of the communities who are affected by the disease.
What this means is that we need to keep reading outside our narrow disciplines. Once in a while, we need to pick up a book of contemporary non-fiction that has nothing to do with what we are studying. Of course, we can’t stay on top of everything, given the way information is growing. But we can stay informed about the kinds of problems we are interested in solving, and reading a wide range of books and articles about these problems.
With the Internet, it is no longer difficult to do this. All it takes is to get our heads out of those subject-specific cubbyholes and look around us, to sometimes use a telescope rather than a microscope.
The author teaches at the University of Hyderabad and edits Teacher Plus. Email: usha.bpgll@gmail.com
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