ABSTRACT
Interdisciplinary subjects focus on how to understand, navigate and employ multiple and often contrary ways of knowing. In these subjects, students learn how to integrate and synthesize different perspectives in order to advance understanding and solve problems that resist understanding or resolution when approached from single disciplines (Boix Mansilla and Duraising 2007). Yet there are numerous challenges to engaging and retaining students in interdisciplinary thinking and learning because of the complexity of working across multiple ways of knowing. Students tend to take the approach of one discipline or subject at a time and do not mix them. Just as C. P. Snow (1964) describes, there seems to be two cultures of students, Science and Arts, who have what McCalman, Muir and Soeterboek (2008: 17) call ‘resistance to learning outside their comfort zones’. This forms an obstacle for understanding and engaging in interdisciplinary thinking, and as a result, students tend to disengage with the complexity and ambiguity of integrating multiple disciplines. This challenge is exacerbated if discipline-specialists teaching in interdisciplinary subjects are not familiar or experienced with interdisciplinarity (especially if teaching in such subjects for the first time), and so they present students with vague, often tacit and conflicting expectations and assessment criteria based on their own disciplinary approaches. In the face of such challenges, it should be no surprise if students do not engage in interdisciplinary thinking.
