Interdisciplinary

In this volume, Julie Klein provides the first comprehensive study of the modern concept of interdisciplinarity, supplementing her discussion with the most complete bibliography yet compiled on the subject. Spanning the social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, and professions, her study is a synthesis of existing scholarship on interdisciplinary research, education and health care. Klein argues that any interdisciplinary activity embodies a complex network of historical, social, psychological, political, economic, philosophical, and intellectual factors. Whether the context is a short-ranged instrumentality or a long-range reconceptualization of the way we know and learn, the concept of interdisciplinarity is an important means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using singular methods or approaches.

The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory guides to current critical terminology. Each volume provides a guide to the use and abuse of terms related to literary studies with an accent on clarity and lively debate.

This book highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity in the academic landscape, and examines how it is understood in the context of the modern university. While interdisciplinarity is encouraged by research funders, academics themselves receive mixed messages about how, when and whether to follow this route. Building upon a series of career history interviews with established interdisciplinary researchers, the author reveals fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of interdisciplinary knowledge, how this is shared, and the skills these researchers bring. The book addresses these issues on both a personal and systemic level, identifying how a resilient researcher can craft their own research trajectory to view interdisciplinarity as a truly embedded approach.

A collection of essays on interdisciplinary theory, research, and teaching.

A critical review of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, the psychology originating from Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). Tracing its roots in Goethe, Hegel and Marx, the author builds a concept of activity transcending the division between individual and social domains in human sciences.

The Second Edition provides a comprehensive introduction to interdisciplinary studies with an approach that is succinct, conceptual, and practical. Completely updated to reflect advances in the literature on research, learning, and assessment, the book describes the role of both disciplines and interdisciplinarity within the academy, and how these have evolved. Authors Allen F. Repko, Rick Szostak, and Michelle Phillips Buchberger effectively show students how to think like interdisciplinarians in order to facilitate their working with topics, complex problems, or themes that span multiple disciplines.

Interdisciplinarity is increasingly viewed as a necessary ingredient in the training of future oriented 21st century disciplines that rely on both analytic and synthetic abilities across disciplines. Nearly every curricular document or vision statement of schools and universities include a call for promoting creativity in students. Yet the construct of creativity and giftedness across disciplines remains elusive in the sense that the prototypical examples of such work come from eminent scientists, artists and mathematicians, and little if any work has been conducted with non-eminent individuals. This monograph is an attempt to fill this gap by putting forth the view that interdisciplinarity and creativity are related constructs, and that the cultivation of domain general creativity is possible. Mathematics has historically been anchored to numerous disciplines like theology, natural philosophy, culture and art, allowing for a flexibility of thought that is difficult to cultivate in other disciplines. In this monograph, the numerous chapters from Australia, U.S.A., Canada, Cyprus, Denmark and Japan provide a compelling illustration of the intricate connection of mathematics with literature, paradoxes, history, technology and modeling, thus serving as a conduit for interdisciplinarity, creativity and learning to occur.

This collection of essays first highlights the popularity of interdisciplinary undergraduate studies and their recent gains in the world of higher education, and then addresses the paradoxical failure of these studies to achieve a permanent position in the curricula of individual universities and colleges. This question and its attendant issues are explored in three ways: (1) an overview of how these changes are affected by the political economy, (2) case studies from actual universities and colleges, and (3) a discussion of the sustainability of undergraduate interdisciplinary studies programs.