The Center of Inquiry is hosting a "Brown Bag Lunch Series" to encourage ongoing campus discussion about the liberal arts. We invite all Wabash faculty and staff to these weekly lunch conversations. The topic of this semester’s conversations is "Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning."
Mark Brouwer, Lilly Teaching Fellow and visiting instructor of philosophy, is coordinating and facilitating the discussions. The main purpose of this semester’s series is to achieve a sustained conversation about the nature and value of interdisciplinary teaching and learning. You are invited to as many or as few lunches as you wish to attend. However, it would be especially fruitful to have a core group of participants to continue conversations and inquiries from week to week.
We will meet every Wednesday during the semester, from 12:15 to 1:00 p.m. Please bring your lunch, ideas, and spirit of collegial exchange to Trippet Hall, Isaac C. Elston, Jr. Board Room (room 325).
The first reading for this semester’s series was Robert O. Petty’s LaFollette Lecture of 1982, "The Margins of Knowledge." Ideally, discussion participants will generate ideas for subsequent readings, and Professor Brouwer will ensure that a reading is selected and circulated well before each lunch. Readings will be posted on Blackboard, in the Center of Inquiry Brownbag Series organization.
As you participate in this semester’s brown bag lunches, consider the following thoughts and questions:
Disciplinary specialization in higher education is ubiquitous and profound. Liberal arts colleges, including Wabash, often advocate "interdisciplinary" teaching and learning as a sort of "remedy" to the narrowness of disciplines and sub-disciplines. On the one hand, two or more narrow approaches added together in a single course might simply make for more, rather than less, narrowness; bio-chemistry and bio-ethics are not necessary any less narrow than biology, chemistry, or philosophy. Might it be that what we want out of interdisciplinary teaching and learning is something qualitatively different from disciplinary specialization? If so, what is this remedy to "narrowness," and will disciplinary expertise be of any assistance in finding such a thing?
On the other hand, disciplinary specialization seems to provide the rigor and standards necessary for excellence in all fields of inquiry. If "interdisciplinarity" is meant to remedy the narrowness of specialization, will it thereby abandon clarity, precision, and justification? Disciplines advance; they advance by taking data, principles, and methods for granted. If interdisciplinary teaching and learning questions these principles, is it even possible for such teaching and learning to advance? If not, by what standards can we evaluate its relative success? If interdisciplinarity does not assume the narrow standards of any discipline, what standards could it have?
Contact Mark Brouwer with any questions, comments, or suggestions.