Interdisciplinary Studies are a response to increasing specialization and fragmentation of knowledge on university campuses. With disciplines and majors come paradigms of scholarship – rule-bound investigative methods and theories and assumptions and ways of presenting evidence and arguments that separate one discipline from the next, and one sub-discipline from the others, producing ever more specialized knowledge over time. The benefits of specialization are many, leading to profound investigations of particular problems. But there is also value in understanding the interconnections of fields of knowledge, especially when we wish to apply scholarly methods to larger goals of engagement with the wider community as citizens.
Interdisciplinary approaches allow for meta-cognitive reflection by students and faculty members on the sense-making protocols intellectuals use in framing, investigating, and writing conclusively and persuasively about complex problems. These approaches also enable courses to be centered on topics not easily contained within a discipline, and facilitate collaborative pedagogies, often using project-based courses and service learning.
The Honors College embraces both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to deliver its curriculum. The latter presents experts from different disciplines to address diverse aspects of a complex problem (e.g., the search for self), with each expert invoking the issue from the perspective of a specific discipline, while the former requires presenters to meld two or more disciplines to create a new (interdisciplinary) approach (e.g., environmental literature, religious studies, Asian studies, linguistic philosophy, social psychology, etc.). Although interdisciplinary courses or portions of courses are not exclusive to the Honors College, what is unique is having interdisciplinarity be central to the mission of the Honors College curricula.
Honors Core Program
Courses in the Honors Core offer students credits that satisfy university Core requirements. The Core courses serve as the introductory courses for all of the Honors College learning objectives. All students, whether they enter as incoming freshmen or as Track II students, are required to enroll in HONC 1310 and 1320.
A dilemma is created on this second level as each course proceeds, because the ideas covered do not accord with one another, nor do they flow in a logical or chronological sequence one from the next. Consequently, even though each student receives a plausible case that Thinker Number One is correct and that Thinker Number Two is correct, Thinkers One and Two do not agree; thus a student must reflect to find a way to confront and perhaps resolve the discrepancy. Understanding the disciplinary context in which each thinker operates helps students appreciate nuance in ideational differences.
With each new thinker introduced, the reflective method becomes ever more sorely tested as the discrepancies and disciplinary assumptions multiply. Thus, the course begins to operate on a level beyond either of the other two, one that existentially engages students in a process of cognitive and moral challenge. Assumptions are questioned and worldviews examined, while faculty members guide students in discovering and honing methods of analysis.
Honors Core I is team taught, allowing for a multidisciplinary approach. Students meet bi-weekly in a small group discussion setting, and once weekly for a large group lecture. This course will introduce students to the skills of self-authorship, interdisciplinary learning, written communication, and critical inquiry and analysis.
Honors Core II is also team taught, allowing for a multidisciplinary approach. Class meetings alternate between large and small group meetings, with large group taking place no more than once weekly and continually less frequently as the semester progresses. Students enrolled in Honors Core II will complete a service learning project as part of the requirements for this course. This course will introduce students to the skills of integrative scholarship and ethical decision making as well as continue to practice previously introduced skills.
Encountering this content brings with it an inherent challenge, requiring nearly every participant to question assumptions and taken-for-granted, received “wisdoms” acquired in one’s youth. Honors Core III is not (usually) team-taught, with students enrolling in one of five or six different offerings, in courses with student-teacher ratios of no more than fifteen to one. Having small classes all semester (contrasted with the Freshman Seminars’ sometimes large, sometimes small groups) puts students in a position to make more frequent oral presentations. By taking increasing responsibility for what transpires in the classroom, a student has a greater number of opportunities to make “commitments in the face of contextual pluralism” (William Perry). This course will introduce students to the skills of analyzing familiar cultural assumptions and will continue to practice previously introduced skills.
Honors Interdisciplinary Studies Minor
The requirement of interdisciplinarity remains critical to the mission of the junior and senior curricula, through which students are able to earn a minor in interdisciplinary studies. They are required to complete two junior-level seminars, courses delimited not by a discipline but by topic; a senior seminar that investigates global issues in an interdisciplinary manner; and an Oxford Tutorial followed by a Senior Capstone, during which a student completes a year-long, interdisciplinary project of undergraduate scholarship.
