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Interdisciplinary Work and the Future of EducationDecisive shifts in knowledge production characterize the turn of the 21st century. The alliance of medical doctors, engineers, computer scientists, and molecular biologists is revolutionizing medical care through new, minimally invasive surgery technologies and artificial human tissue development. Pressing social issues like globalization, poverty, terrorism, and environmental survival challenge scientists, historians, psychologists, and artists alike to converge on solutions that defy disciplinary boundaries. Interdisciplinary understanding (i.e., the ability to integrate knowledge from two or more disciplines to create products, solve problems, or produce explanations) has become a hallmark of contemporary knowledge production and a primary challenge for contemporary educators. Since October 2000, we have been exploring the cognitive, organizational, and pedagogical qualities of interdisciplinary work as it takes place in exemplary expert institutions, collegiate, and pre-collegiate educational programs. We have produced preliminary characterizations of "end state performances" of the interdisciplinary mind at work. The resulting portrayals include descriptions of the more or less explicit strategies that experts use to cross disciplinary boundaries and negotiate epistemological differences. They also address the qualities of intellectual character exhibited by these researchers (e.g., a disposition to tackle risky and ill-defined problems and to consider alternative perspectives). Our study of exemplary pre-collegiate and collegiate interdisciplinary educational programs has allowed us to establish preliminary parameters for a pedagogy of interdisciplinarity. We have identified a series of strategies that teachers use to integrate disciplinary views in the classroom (e.g., from centering instruction on complex and often ill-defined problems to placing disciplinary knowledge in historical contexts). We have begun to characterize teachers' approaches to the central pedagogical blind spot of current interdisciplinary educational theory and in practice--that of assessing student progress. Our analyses of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with teachers and students have allowed us to gain a sense of the purpose of interdisciplinary teaching and learning, the tensions and continuities between disciplinary and interdisciplinary education, and the common misconceptions that this kind of work reveals. In the current phase of our work, we are formalizing the elements of a quality education for interdisciplinary understanding at the pre-collegiate level. We have worked closely with teachers and disciplinary experts to replicate the action-research approach that characterized Project Zero's much heralded Teaching for Understanding project--a research design geared to yielding usable knowledge about how to teach for interdisciplinary understanding, assess student outcomes, and support professional development.. For more detailed information on the Interdisciplinary Studies Project, please see our website or publications based on our research.
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