Offers a contemporary of our understanding and practice of interdisciplinary higher education. This book considers a range of theoretical perspectives on interdisciplinarity: the nature of disciplines, complexity, leadership, group working, and academic development.

Clarification of the aims and problems of interdisciplinarity, as this book demonstrates, not only will help reveal the movement's probable impact on university teaching and research but also will shed light on the overall future of the university. This book therefore speaks to faculty members and administrators in general, as well as to teachers and students whose specialty is the study of higher education. A recurring theme is that every academic specialty can be justified for purposes of research, provided it does not lead to overspecialization in education. The proviso is a formidable one, challenging the intellect, the will, and the good faith of all concerned. Yet interdisciplinarity has a fundamental historical sanction: disciplinary domains are not immutable but rather are constantly evolving through fission and fusion. (Examples of fission are the division of medieval grammar and rhetoric into modern lingustic and literary studies, or of 19th-century biology into today's life sciences. Fusion is exemplified in a range of fields from astrophysics through biochemistry to psycholinguists and social psychology.) A general perspective on the continuing debate about interdisciplinary is presented in the first four chapters, followed by six chapters on specific problems and prospects. The introduction reviews well-founded as well as misdirected objections to interdisciplinarity, contrasting &"natural&" interactions as in geophysics (arising from intrinsic developments) with &"artificial&" ones as in general education courses (arising from curriculum design) &—but holding that the latter can be as legitimate as the former if responsive to genuine educational needs. Chapters 1 to 4 give the historical and philosophical background of interdisciplinarity from Plato's Academy to the Center for Educational Research and Innovation. Chapters 5 to 7 consider specific challenges in the respective domains of natural science, social science, and the humanities&—cautioning against incompetent borrowings of paradigms. Chapters 8 and 9 treat the methodological, institutional, and personal problems arising from boundary-crossing. Chapter 10 critically analyzes three cases of interdisciplinary innovation in the United States and gives summary descriptions of programs in a dozen countries.

As universities increasingly offer courses that break the confines of a single subject area, more students are enrolling on interdisciplinary programmes within multidisciplinary departments. Teaching and learning within interdisciplinary study requires new approaches, including an understanding of the critical perspectives and frameworks and the rearranging of intellectual and professional boundaries. Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching in Higher Education explores the issues and tensions provoked by interdisciplinary learning, offering helpful information for: Staff development Distance learning Mass communication courses Interdisciplinary science courses Grounded in thorough research, this collection is the first of its kind to provide practical advice and guidance from around the world, improving the quality of teaching and learning in interdisciplinary programmes.

This book addresses the contributions of design thinking to higher education and explores the benefits and challenges of design thinking discourses and practices in interdisciplinary contexts. With a particular focus on Australia, the USA and UK, the book examines the value and drawbacks of employing design thinking in different disciplines and contexts, and also considers its future.

Calls for closer connections among disciplines can be heard throughout the world of scholarly research, from major universities to the National Institutes of Health. In Defense of Disciplines presents a fresh and daring analysis of the argument surrounding interdisciplinarity. Challenging the belief that blurring the boundaries between traditional academic fields promotes more integrated research and effective teaching, Jerry Jacobs contends that the promise of interdisciplinarity is illusory and that critiques of established disciplines are often overstated and misplaced. Drawing on diverse sources of data, Jacobs offers a new theory of liberal arts disciplines such as biology, economics, and history that identifies the organizational sources of their dynamism and breadth. Illustrating his thesis with a wide range of case studies including the diffusion of ideas between fields, the creation of interdisciplinary scholarly journals, and the rise of new fields that spin off from existing ones, Jacobs turns many of the criticisms of disciplines on their heads to mount a powerful defense of the enduring value of liberal arts disciplines. This will become one of the anchors of the case against interdisciplinarity for years to come.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is introducing automation technology into all major disciplines, including business, engineering, and education. Higher education institutions need to incorporate this digital transformation in order to remain competitive. Redesigning Higher Education Initiatives for Industry 4.0 is an essential reference source that discusses education strategies for human-computer interactions in an automated world and the role of education in conjunction with artificial intelligence and virtual technologies. Featuring research on topics such as e-learning, mobile devices, and artificial intelligence, this book is ideally designed for professionals, IT specialists, researchers, librarians, administrators, and educators.

Drawing together example studies from international contexts, this edited collection provides a new and cross-disciplinary perspective on the concept of the possible self, exploring its theoretical, methodological and empirical uses with regards to Higher Education. Building on research which examines the ways in which possible selves are constructed through inequalities of class, race and gender, the book interrogates the role of imagined futures in student, professional and academic lives, augmenting the concept of possible selves, with its origins in psychology, with sociological approaches to educational inequalities and exclusionary practices. Possible Selves and Higher Education considers both the theoretical and methodological frameworks behind the concept of possible selves; the first section includes chapters that consider different theoretical insights, while the second section offers empirical examples, exploring how the possible selves concept has been used in many diverse higher education research contexts. With each chapter considering a different aspect of the structural barriers to or within education, the examples provided range from the experiences of students and teachers in the language learning classroom, to graduates entering employment for the first time, and refugees seeking to rebuild lives through engagement with education. Offering a broad and diverse examination of how concepts of our future selves can affect and limit educational outcomes, this book furthers the sociological dialogue concerning the relationship between individual agency and structural constraints in higher education research. It is an essential and influential text for both students and academics, as well as anyone responsible for student services such as outreach and widening participation.

Reinventing Ourselves examines the experiences and lessons from over 20 different institutions pioneering new approaches for more effective teaching and learning. Many of the colleges included in this volume began as both educational and social experiments, representing new ways of thinking about educational goals, curricular organization, institutional governance, and faculty roles and rewards. With new calls for both rethinking our approaches to teaching and learning and for reviewing the traditional boundaries within institutions and between disciplines, Reinventing Ourselves offers a rich store of ideas from which to draw.

In the United States, broad study in an array of different disciplines â€"arts, humanities, science, mathematics, engineeringâ€" as well as an in-depth study within a special area of interest, have been defining characteristics of a higher education. But over time, in-depth study in a major discipline has come to dominate the curricula at many institutions. This evolution of the curriculum has been driven, in part, by increasing specialization in the academic disciplines. There is little doubt that disciplinary specialization has helped produce many of the achievement of the past century. Researchers in all academic disciplines have been able to delve more deeply into their areas of expertise, grappling with ever more specialized and fundamental problems. Yet today, many leaders, scholars, parents, and students are asking whether higher education has moved too far from its integrative tradition towards an approach heavily rooted in disciplinary "silos". These "silos" represent what many see as an artificial separation of academic disciplines. This study reflects a growing concern that the approach to higher education that favors disciplinary specialization is poorly calibrated to the challenges and opportunities of our time. The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education examines the evidence behind the assertion that educational programs that mutually integrate learning experiences in the humanities and arts with science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) lead to improved educational and career outcomes for undergraduate and graduate students. It explores evidence regarding the value of integrating more STEMM curricula and labs into the academic programs of students majoring in the humanities and arts and evidence regarding the value of integrating curricula and experiences in the arts and humanities into college and university STEMM education programs.

Interdisciplinarity, a favorite buzzword of faculty and administrators, has been appropriated to describe so many academic pursuits that it is virtually meaningless. With a writing style that is accessible, fluid, and engaging, Lisa Lattuca remedies this confusion with an original conceptualization of interdisciplinarity based on interviews with faculty who are engaged in its practice. Whether exploring the connections between apparently related disciplines, such as English and women's studies, or such seemingly disparate fields as economics and theology, Lattuca moves away from previous definitions based on the degrees of integration across disciplines and instead focuses on the nature of the inquiry behind the work. She organizes her findings around the processes through which faculty pursue interdisciplinarity, the contexts (institutional, departmental, and disciplinary) in which faculty are working, and the ways in which those contexts relate to and affect the interdisciplinary work. Her findings result in useful suggestions for individuals concerned with the meaning of faculty work, the role and impact of disciplines in academe today, and the kinds of issues that should guide the evaluation of faculty scholarship.