Course Design and Interdisciplinary Theory
Introduction
and basic issues of course development
What is Interdisciplinarity? A Brief
Survey of the Literature
Interdisciplinary
Theory and the IDST 2310 Fine and Applied Arts Course
Introduction and Basic Issues of Course Development
The purpose of IDST 2310: The Fine and Applied Arts in Civilization is to introduce students to the contributions of the world's great civilizations to the fine and applied arts, including painting, sculpture, the textile arts, pottery, art history, architecture, music, drama, literature, poetry, philosophy, and other disciplines. The course also introduces students to the elements of art, to the problems of understanding what we mean when we call something a work of art, and to several aesthetic schools of art appreciation. A team of faculty from various disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and fine and applied arts designed the overall framework of the course; the original team suggested that the course theme be "form and function" and suggested various materials they felt absolutely needed to be covered. Among those materials were the Egyptian pyramids, the Athenian acropolis, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, cave art, Islamic mosques, and medieval cathedrals. It was very important to the majority of the faculty team to incorporate a strong global perspective into the course, and we suggested covering Asian landscape art as well as several other nonwestern topics.
One important problem that faces those who teach the course is that it is all too easy to emphasize the visual arts over the music, literature, and theater content. The course falls under Area C: Literature and Fine Arts in our core curriculum, and is placed in the Fine Arts as opposed to the literature section of Area C. Its purpose, then, is to provide grounding in the visual arts, architecture, and music as opposed to literature and, perhaps, even theater, as the lit courses tend to cover that material. Further, in Area B of our core, students are required to take a survey course in one of the disciplines of the arts, including Music, Theater, or the visual arts. This course is offered on the 2000 level, while the Area B courses are 1000 level courses. The Fine and Applied Arts interdisciplinary course is designed to complement and build upon these introductory courses, and to develop appreciation for the complexity of issues surrounding the arts through an interdisicplinary context. The place of this course in relation to the Area B courses complicates issues of course design; while we hope that most freshman have had the surveys, indeed many have not when they enroll in this course. It has no prerequisites, and despite our best efforts to dissuade freshman from enrolling, it happens often. Also, faculty cannot control which of the three survey courses students have enrolled in prior to taking this course, and so we cannot count on students having a firm foundation in any area of the arts.
Most faculty teaching this course tend to emphasize the visual arts, and most are by profession Art Historians; two faculty, including myself, are historians with considerable background in art history. Although I also have a degree in music, I tend to emphasize the visual arts as I find it difficult to teach the musical concepts on a thematic level to non-musicians. In this course one cannot focus on developing a strong foundation for music appreciation as one could in a survey dedicated to music, but must rather integrate a discussion of music into a thematic discussion of a problem using other disciplinary resources. Many students simply do not have the musical background for me to construct the sort of units I would like and need to construct.
Another area we have struggled to incorporate is the Applied Arts, traditionally neglected in many such courses. Our team incorporated several active learning units to accommodate our desire not to slight the applied arts; in the fall semester 1998, for example, students completed a unit on weaving and learned to throw pots. Due to a shortage of applied arts faculty, in later semesters we designed lecture/discussions along with in-class mini-workshops to cover this material. For several semesters we used one of our Art History faculty members who has some expertise in the applied arts, Dr. Roxanne Farrar, to float between the sections of this course for these mini-workshops (see my Spring 99, Fall 99 and Spring 2000 sections).
We also incorporated experiential learning on another level, and taught foundational materials for several on-campus gallery exhibits or performances which students are required to attend. Students attended these events as a class and completed written assignments; in many cases, the performers also came to class. This was true in the fall 1999 as students attended sessions of the Medieval Festival which I organized, including a performance of Beowulf. Students were then studying the unit on medieval architecture in the course, which included an intense discussion of the cathedral of Chartres in the context of medieval culture. They read portions of Beowulf, and the performer then came to class to discuss storytelling as an art form.
All of us wanted to design and teach a course that was truly interdisciplinary and so began by selecting an appropriate theme around which to organize the course. The original suggestion to structure the course around the theme of "form and function" proved unsatisfying for me. While the discussion of form and function was appropriate for some topics the team had insisted be covered, as for example the Athenian acropolis, the theme did not adequately hold together the entire course. For one thing, I wanted to pursue a host of other topics with each unit, and felt that they would get lost when I emphasized the overall theme, while the theme would get lost if I focused on other topics which were equally important. Subsequently, another member of the team, Dr. Martha Keber in the History Department, and I created four main units for the course which focus on aesthetic schools of art appreciation, and then constructed several subunits out of the previous materials while adding others to provide examples of each particular school of thought. We thought that these units would provide the unity which a simple reliance on form and function alone would not. Along with Dr. Keber, I piloted this rudimentary version of the course in the fall of 1998 and again in the spring of 1999.
The aesthetic schools around which we organized the course are Functionalism, Art as Mirror of Reality (realism and idealism, surrealism, etc.), Art and the Ordered Cosmos (Asian views of nature, including Taoism and Japanese schools of thought, and the European Mechanistic Universe of the Eighteenth-Century), and Art as Self-expression (including psychological theories of the self, Asian views of the self, a study of art, literature, and music of the Romantic era, and a study of the self-portrait in art.) In each unit, we tried to incorporate resources from multiple disciplines, though some units, such as the ones on Realism and Idealism, tended to be more heavily weighted toward the visual arts, at least in the early stages of the course and in the fall 1999. Many of the units in my section of the course, however, went well beyond the arts themselves and made use of historical (see the units on Art and the State and Houses of Prayer for examples), psychological, sociological, and other perspectives.
The initial results were quite unsatisfying to me. I did not feel that I was presenting a problems-based course, which in my view, was necessary to truly unify an interdisciplinary course. Beginning in the fall of 1999, I dropped "form and function" as the course theme, and shifted to an exploration of the most basic problem in art, "What is Art?," from the point of view of the four broad aesthetic responses above to this question. From the beginning of the course, students were now introduced to problems relating to the very nature of art and different schools of interpretation, and the results were much more satisfying from the point of view of organization.
IDST 2310 is a difficult course to teach, as there is a massive amount of information the faculty team thought important to cover; the course is a one-semester survey of the Fine and Applied Arts, beginning with prehistoric cave art and including contemporary art. Because the course has a thematic and problems-based structure, we present topics without regard to chronology, even though there are long stretches in the semester where one can easily and does present information sequentially from one chronological period to another.
The thematic nature of the course, its lack of consistent chronological approach, as well as the interdisciplinary nature of the course made it difficult, if not impossible, for us to find adequate texts to use. During the first semester we piloted the course, fall 1998, we used the Norton Anthology of World Literature and several other readings as our text. Students found it very difficult to absorb the material we covered (see my syllabus from this semester) without any kind of hard copy text which synthesized the art, literature, and music we covered. Although I passed out copious handouts for every class period, students found the complexity of the course difficult to navigate. In order to synthesize the material, they desperately needed additional help. Consequently, I decided that we needed to write our own text for the course. In 1998 I received a Model Technology Infused Course Development grant from the University System of Georgia Board of Regents' Office of Instruction and Information technology to create a multimedia textbook for this course and wrote nineteen different units or modules for the course. I organized the contributions of several other faculty, and the result is that students have a very complete means of preparing for each session as well as reviewing materials and slides.
In addition, I now have a very complete means of documenting the design and enactment of my section of the IDST 2310 course! Viewers can visit the multimedia site, and explore our detailed discussions of each unit along with the various slides, handouts, and other resources we used. Beginning in the fall 1999, students used this material through a WEBCT course package. Viewers may also explore the material in the WEBCT environment, using the username dvess_stu and the password: dvess_stu to log on. The WEBCT course package also includes several online quizzes which students are required to take as well as assigned bulletin board postings. A close look at these units will enable us to discuss with greater clarity some issues with regard to the interdisciplinarity of the course.
What is Interdisciplinarity? A Brief Survey of the Literature
Julie Klein states that "interdisciplinarity has been variously defined in this century: as a methodology, a concept, a process, a way of thinking, a philosophy, and a reflexive ideology. It has been linked with attempts to expose the dangers of fragmentation, to reestablish old connections, to explore emerging relations, and to create new subjects adequate to handle our practical and conceptual needs. Cutting across all these theories is one recurring idea. Interdisciplinarity is a means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using single methods or approaches" (1). The theoretical literature on interdisciplinarity distinguishes several approaches which make use of the perspectives and methodologies of multiple disciplines. These approaches include multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, pluridisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and interdisciplinary.
Interdisciplinary work is broadly defined in the literature as "inquiries which critically draw upon two or more disciplines and which lead to an integration of disciplinary insights." Multidisciplinary courses, on the other hand, "arrange in serial fashion the separate contributions of selected disciplines to a problem or issue, without any attempt at synthesis." Pluridisciplinary courses also bring multiple disciplines to bear on a topic, and make an effort to compare and contrast methodologies and content and convey an implicit awareness and discussion of disciplinary methodologies. Nevertheless, there may is no explicit attempt at integration in a pluridisciplinary course. Cross-disciplinary work, in contrast, emphasizes one disciplinary perspective in particular, and although cross-disciplinarians usually make use of more than one discipline "the second discipline becomes a passive object of study rather than an active system of thought." An example of cross-disciplinary work would be a course on the physics of music, where the principles of physics are applied to music, but the actual discipline of music is shuffled to the background. Further, many important issues central to an understanding of music go unexplored. Transdisciplinary work takes "as an underlying article of faith the underlying unity of all knowledge" in their search for a superdiscipline (2).
Julie Klein has argued that interdisciplinary work presents a paradox. Klein suggests that there is a "continuing rhetorical opposition of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, an oversimplified dichotomy that obscures the more subtle interactions that do take place. There is also a related tendency to link disciplinarity strictly with analytical skills and interdisciplinarity with synthetic skills, when, in fact, there are different degrees of analysis and synthesis in each. "Synthesis occurs in all disciplinary work while "the relationship between synthesis and analysis is a recurrent topic within interdisciplinary discourse" (3). Indeed, many interdisciplinarians argue that the traditional disciplines are the foundation of interdisciplinary work, and examination of their methodologies and perspectives is the basis for an interdisciplinary study. The disciplines are necessary to regulate the process of "detect[ing] error and distinguish[ing] good work from bad;" they are the "source of instrumental and conceptual materials for problem-solving, the base for integration, and the substance for metacritical reflection" (4). The need for the disciplines in order to engage in interdisciplinary work leads to what Klein calls a "disciplinary paradox": unless interdisciplinarity conceived of as "general systems theory" itself becomes an intellectual species, "the other species in the intellectual ecosystem are likely to regard it more as a virus that threatens them than as a food to sustain them" (5). interdisciplinarity, from this point of view, functions as "not a simple supplement but is complementary to and corrective of the disciplines" (6), and enables them to participate in addressing problems which go beyond their particular frameworks.
How, then, does one structure an interdisciplinary course and what should be the learning outcomes? According to the literature, the most effective structure for an interdisciplinary course is to be organized around "salient concepts" (7) defined as a particular theme, issue, problem, cultural or historical period, or geographical region of central importance to multiple disciplines. The issue should be focused, but with enough depth to allow for the generation of multiple sub-issues which can be examined from the perspectives of several different disciplines.
Although there is copious literature on the theoretical differences between the perspectives discussed above, actual practice tends to blur these distinctions. As Stanley Fish has so eloquently put it, "being interdisciplinary is so very hard to do" (8). Fish, of course, is arguing that the very premise of interdisciplinary studies is fallacious, that none of us can truly step back and creative an integrative view while nevertheless maintaining the framework of our separate disciplines. Whether or not one agrees with him, interdisciplinarity has long been a valued educational approach if for no other reason than there are so many problems whose complexity transcends the capacity of any single discipline to explain and/or answer them.
Interdisciplinary
Theory and the IDST 2310 Fine and Applied Arts Course
The IDST 2310 course is an attempt to create an interdisciplinary analysis of the problem of "what is art?". This problem is focused enough to unify the course, while nevertheless being deep enough to provide endless amounts of disciplinary resources with which to approach it. The course systematically presents the disciplinary perspectives of art, architecture, literature, poetry, music, theater, religion, and history. It also incorporates psychology and other disciplines in subordinate roles. Nancy Anne Cluck has argued forcefully that interdisciplinary work integrating the perspectives of history, philosophy, religion, literature and the arts is based upon fundamental areas of intersection where systematic interdisciplinary inquiry is possible. "The techniques of history, philosophy, and religion are similar, though not identical, because these disciplines furnish the narrative, factual and theoretical framework for the humanities. Literature, drama, art, and music, on the other hand, emphasize the experiential basis" (9). She argues that R.S. Crane has provided the theoretical basis of such integration through redefining these areas in terms of their skills and methodologies. Crane classifies them as linguistics, analysis of ideas, literary and artistic criticism, and historiography; he further argues that "the four arts are the arts of the humanities, because they are pertinent in varying degrees to all subject matters with which humanists commonly deal; they thus cut across the boundaries dividing the subject matters from one another; and it is precisely the convergence of all of them upon any subject matter that makes it, in the completes degree, humanistic ..." (10). Mieke Ball further makes the natural areas of integration between literature and painting clear in her Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition; here, she clarifies the ways in which narrative is not at odds with the visual image, and the ways in which paintings may be read as texts.(11) Further, history has been called "one of the busiest areas of cross-disciplinary combinations" has often been viewed by historians as a "federation of overlapping disciplines" (12). History is an important perspective for those whose disciplines concentrate on observing and analyzing human affairs, such as philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. Over the last century, historians have borrowed from many different disciplines, and have progressively moved away from political history as a focal point. Interest in intellectual and cultural history has grown over the last several decades; from this point of view, the historical perspective provides an excellent basis for integrating the various disciplinary materials in the IDST 2310 course. The content, aims, and choice of disciplines of the IDST 2310 course, then, would seem to be based on very strong theoretical foundations.
To explore the choice of materials and thematic organization of the IDST 2310 course over several semesters, click on the links below.
Fall
1998 syllabus pilot version
Fall
1999 course enactment reflects the shift to "What is art?"
as a thematic approach
Spring
and Fall 2000 enactments several modifications to the course based
on research into student learning (see the Fall
1999 reflection section for background discussion)
Spring
2001 enactment more modifications based on research into student learning
William H. Newell has drawn up a Guide to Interdisciplinary Syllabus Preparation (13) . Among the items he lists as indicators of interdisciplinary integration are:
1. Is the course issue based? What makes that question appropriate to interdisciplinary inquiry?
2. Is the issue focused enough? Are there few enough subissues for students to develop an understanding of the various perspectives on the issue?
3. Are the perspectives of the disciplines or schools of thought explicit?
4. How dominant is one discipline? Do the less-dominant disciplines provide more than subject matter?
5. Is there a hook or grabber at the beginning that draws students into the issue...?
6. Is the course structure clear? Does the syllabus serve as a map of, or orientation to, the course? Do the tools, readings, and subtext for each week reinforce each other and advance the understanding of the issue?
7. Does the instructor have an explicit subtext (the real educational agenda -- e.g., exposure to the disciplines, development of skills./Values/sensitivities -- of which the substantive topic of a particular embodiment)?
8. Is integration ongoing, or does it appear only at the end of the course?
9. Does more than one discipline contribute to the depth of the course?
In the course enactment section of this portfolio, I attempt to assess in more depth how this course meets or fails to meet these criteria. I also examine learning outcomes in relation to course design, student work, and feedback on survey. In the enactment section, I note areas in which the course needed and continues to need refinement in interdisciplinary design. The value of this portfolio is, in part, to chart the difficulties involved in creating a truly interdisciplinarity course even from the point of view of an experienced practitioner; these reflections may provide some solace and, hopefully, some inspiration, for those about to embark on an interdisciplinary course. Further, the portfolio provides extensive documentation of problems related to interdisciplinary student learning in the context of particular forms of course enactment, and makes some suggestions for effective interdisciplinary models and assignments.
Continue
to the course enactment section
ENDNOTES
1. Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, & Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 196.
2. William H. Newell and William J. Green , "Defining and Teaching Interdisciplinary Studies," in Improving College and University Teaching 30:1 (Winter 1982), 24.
3. Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity, 105.
4. Ibid., 106. See also David Riesman, "The Scholar at the Border: Staying Put and Moving Around inside the American University," Columbia Forum Spring 1974; Corina Delkeskamp, "Interdisciplinarity: A Critical Appraisal," in Knowledge, Value, and Belief, ed. H.T. Engelhardt and D. Callahan (Hastings-on-Hudson: Hastings Center, 1977); Michael W. Messmer, "The Vogue of Interdisciplinarity," Centennial Review vol. 12 no. 4 (1978). Klein has a succinct discussion of these and other works in her Interdisciplinarity volume.
5. Kenneth Boulding, "The Future of General Systems," in Interdisciplinary Teaching, ed. Alvin M. White (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1981), 33. quoted in Klein, Interdisciplinarity, 107.
6. Julie Thompson Klein and William H. Newell, "Advancing Interdisciplinary Studies," in Handbook of the Undergraduate Curriculum, eds. Jerry gaff and James Ratcliff (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1996), 394.
7. Barbara Hursh, Paul Haas, and Michael Moore, "An Interdisciplinary Model to Implement General Education," in Journal of Higher Education 54 (1983), 52.
8. Stanley Fish, "Being Interdisciplinary is So Very Hard to Do," in Issues in Integrative Studies 9 (1991): 97-125. Reprinted from Profession 89 (1989): 15-22.
9. Nancy A. Cluck, "Reflections on the Interdisciplinary Approach to the Humanities", in Liberal Education 66:1 (1980), 71.
10. R.S. Crane, The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical, quoted in Cluck, Nancy, "Reflections," 72.
11. Ball, Mieke, Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. The Northrop Frye Lectures in Literary Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
12. Mattie Dogan and Robert Pahre, Creative Marginality: Innovations at the Intersections of Social Sciences (Boulder, Co.: Westview, 1990), 87; Charles Tilly, "How and What are Historians Doing," in Divided Knowledge: Across Disciplines, Across Cultures, ed. David Easton and Corinne Schelling (Newbury Park, Ca.: Sage, 1991). Both quoted in Julie Thompson Klein, "Blurring, Cracking, and Crossing: Permeation and Fracturing of Discipline," in Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity, eds. Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway, David J. Sylvan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 203-204.
13. William H. Newell, "Guide to Interdisciplinary Syllabus Preparation," in Journal of General Education 45.2 (1996); rpt. William H. Newell, ed. Interdisciplinarity: Essays from the Literature (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1998): 97-99.