Interdisciplinary curriculum reform in the changing university

Interdisciplinary curriculum reform in the changing universityVictoria Millar Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia ABSTRACT I

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Interdisciplinary curriculum reform in the changing university

Victoria Millar

To cite this article: Victoria Millar (2016) Interdisciplinary curriculum reform in the changing

university, Teaching in Higher Education, 21:4, 471-483, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2016.1155549

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1155549

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Interdisciplinary curriculum reform in the changing university

Victoria Millar

Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT

In response to the current demands and trends within education, the

disciplines as one of the core long-standing organizing structures

within knowledge production and transmission are questioning and

shifting what and how they teach Universities are increasingly

offering interdisciplinary subjects and programmes as an alternative

to or alongside disciplinary subjects This paper investigates the

underlying themes and principles that inform curriculum debate

around the value of the disciplines and interdisciplinarity in Australia

when compared to the views and practices of academics A focus

on the knowledge that is included in discipline-based and

interdisciplinary curricula reveals interdisciplinary knowledge to be

more weakly classi fied and framed than discipline-based knowledge.

This has consequences for the depth of interdisciplinary knowledge

and requires the consideration of the structure and place of

interdisciplinary curricula in university education.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 30 October 2015 Accepted 14 February 2016

KEYWORDS

Curriculum; disciplines; interdisciplinarity; knowledge

Introduction

Universities are undoubtedly going through a period of reflection and reform in relation to their broad mission and the role they play as knowledge transmitters and builders of new knowledge Pressures that universities face both internally and externally have given rise to

a number of conflicting questions and issues in regard to the kinds of knowledge that should be included in curriculum Universities in recent decades have seen a knowledge explosion and increasing specialization while also facing a greater focus on instrumental-ism and accountability Where once curriculum closely followed a traditional discipline-based structure, universities are increasingly looking to structure curriculum in new ways

As Rizvi and Lingard discuss,‘curriculum reform has been linked to the reconstitution

of education as a central arm of national economic policy, as well as being central to the imagined community the nation wishes to construct’ (2010, 96) Whereas once university curriculum was almost entirely determined by disciplinary experts, this has changed and the influence that external stakeholders now have in directing curriculum is unprece-dented Through policies and programmes and the frameworks they embrace, govern-ments embed directions as to what should be given priority There have increasingly been calls from government and employees to have students graduating that can

CONTACT Victoria Millar vmillar@unimelb.edu.au Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University

of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1155549

contribute positively to society, and the economy and employees are voicing their con-cerns about the kinds of students that universities are graduating (Case2011) Questions about what knowledge and skills students should learn alongside how best to prepare stu-dents for the workplace, how to maintain relevance and the ability to tackle society’s big problems create an inevitable challenge for curriculum change and development

In the debate about what a modern curriculum should look like, interdisciplinarity has arisen as one possible part of the solution While calls for interdisciplinarity have perme-ated the discourse around higher education for many decades, it is argued in this paper that in more recent times the dominant call for interdisciplinarity has at its core been instrumentalist in orientation, particularly the focus on skill building and dealing with the world’s current ‘grand challenges’ Interdisciplinary curricula are seen to meet some

of the contemporary demands for knowledge and skills that equip students for addressing the most challenging problems of our time (Holmwood 2010; Moore 2011) In recent years, many previously tradition-bound universities have made radical reforms to their curriculum in many cases, shifting the balance between discipline-based and interdisci-plinary components of the curriculum

This paper investigatesfirstly the underlying themes and principles that inform curri-culum debate around the value of the disciplines and interdisciplinarity with a particular focus on Australia This is then explored in light of recent calls in the literature to‘bring knowledge back in’ (Young2008) It is argued that discussions of interdisciplinarity both

in government and institutional documents and much of the literature do not directly address the kind of knowledge that is being taught in interdisciplinary curricula and instead focus on the beneficial skills that stem from interdisciplinary learning The paper provides a new perspective on disciplinary and interdisciplinary curriculum through a consideration of the knowledge that is taught in these two contexts This is done by drawing on data from two research projects that consider the perceptions and practices of academics in relation to discipline-based and interdisciplinary knowledge

On the basis of this, it is concluded that current drivers for interdisciplinarity in university curricula are largely instrumental and that interdisciplinary curricula do not allow access

to the same depth of knowledge that is available in discipline-based courses The paper concludes with a consideration of how the issue of depth in interdisciplinary curricula might be addressed

Interdisiplinarity

In discussions of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, some observers have labelled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the disciplinary stage when compared to the pre-dis-ciplinary stage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Frodeman2014) Such discus-sions often take this to the logical next step in making a call for a post-disciplinary stage (Frodeman2014), a more interdisciplinary stage There is no doubt that the disciplines in recent times form the‘modern social order of knowledge’ (Weingart and Stehr2000, xi) Disciplines provide a way of sedimenting, focusing on and building knowledge over time,

of developing understandings of the world and ways of further researching it that extend beyond the individuals or social entities that make up thefield The disciplines also play a crucial role in reducing the complexity of knowledge and providing a crucial framework

for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge (see Abbott2001, 130–131; Rosch

1978, 29)

Disciplines are also social entities in their origins and interests, and in their professional associations, journals, communications and the identities of those who work in them (Becher and Trowler2001) It is this deeply social aspect of the disciplines, their ‘disciplin-ary culture’, that leads some to question the self-referential and reproductive nature and for many the perceived limitations of the disciplines (e.g Frodeman2014) Universities are typically structured around the disciplines (Clark 1986; Weingart and Padberg

2014), and it has been argued that such governance structures can have a large amount

of influence over how easy it is to move across disciplinary boundaries (Crow and Dabars2014) For this reason, it has been suggested that through new interdisciplinary initiatives and directions that universities will be better equipped to tackle the complex issues that society is now faced with and produce students that are better placed to work in a now more complex labour market (see e.g Newell2010; Frodeman2014)

In the past, calls for interdisciplinarity were generally more epistemic in orientation and were responses to an increasing rate of specialization in the disciplines, views that edu-cation should be more holistic and post-modern critiques of the disciplines (Klein1990; Frodeman2014) In more recent times however instrumental calls for interdisciplinarity have dominated Instrumental interdisciplinarity is associated with a push to solve prac-tical problems that require the tools and theories of multiple disciplines and takes up the skill development of students and societies big problems (Klein1990) This move towards more instrumental versions of interdisciplinarity is in line with the now well-known mode

2 view of knowledge proposed by Gibbons et al (1994) In Gibbon et al.’s influential orig-inal work, Mode 1 was seen as the traditional disciplinary and inward-looking mode of knowledge production, whereas Mode 2 is associated with interdisciplinary modes of knowledge that are problem-based and end-focused

Epistemic and instrumental rationales for interdisciplinarity are not necessarily mutually exclusive and many supporters of interdisciplinarity regardless of their justifica-tion see this as a new opportunity for the transformajustifica-tion of the higher educajustifica-tion sector through innovative modes of learning that seeks to bridge traditional disciplinary terri-tories (Davies, Devlin and Tight2010; Gardner and Boix-Mansilla1994; Gibbons et al

1994; Klein1990; Lattuca, Voigt and Fath2004)

Interdisciplinarity in the Australian higher education context

As in many countries such as the USA (Sa2008), Germany (Weingart and Padberg2014) and the UK (Holmwood2010), in recent years the Australian government has repeatedly voiced that universities need to become more interdisciplinary in orientation While in many ways it may be argued that interdisciplinarity has always existed within universities, the discourse around interdisciplinarity in government documents takes a particular pos-ition on the place of disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge A recent study (Woelert and Millar2013) found that Australian government reports and commissioned discussion papers commonly invoke the notion of a transition from mode 1 to mode 2 knowledge production put forward by Gibbons et al (1994) When discussing subjects such as the knowledge or innovation economy, the prevailing view expressed in these documents has been that traditional, discipline-based knowledge is largely inward-looking,‘esoteric’,

and by its very nature unable to address the pressing problems and issues society is facing today

Interdisciplinary curricula are seen as more forward looking and able to provide a sol-ution to more instrumental concerns within higher education, such as curricula relevance and appropriate skill development for the workforce (Millar2016; Moore2000,2011) The

2011 Australian Office for Learning and Teaching Good Practice Report on Curriculum Renewal (Narayan and Edwards), for example, reaffirms this view of interdisciplinarity suggesting that there is a need to emphasise the interdisciplinary‘nature of modern knowl-edge’ and identifies interdisciplinarity as ‘empowering graduates for real-world work and life environments’ and as effective in providing students access to big issues in society (8) These justifications for interdisciplinarity are also seen at the institutional level Univer-sities in Australia have restructured their curricula in a variety of ways to incorporate interdisciplinarity and university statements about curriculum and graduate outcomes are replete with the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity– in particular, talk of producing stu-dents adept at crossing disciplinary boundaries, and able to deal with the world’s big pro-blems such as food security or social and economic inequity

For example, the University of Melbourne website explains the breadth requirement of its curriculum as offering‘the flexibility to take on the many challenges of a 21st century global work environment… ’ (2014) The University of Tasmania describes its recent introduction of common interdisciplinary subjects for undergraduate students as an opportunity for students to‘learn from a multi-disciplinary team with a variety of experi-ences and knowledge… [to develop] … skills and deepen understanding to make a differ-ence in your own life and that of others’ (2013)

The focus on preparedness for the workforce and the beneficial skills of interdisciplin-ary curricula reflects the trend in education towards skill development Beck puts this move towards the more generic aspects of curriculum as‘partly in response to the per-ceived need to functionalize education for a world in which futures are held to be increas-ingly unpredictable’ (2002, 89) Griffith University, a university that has long had an emphasis on interdisciplinary programmes, lists as one of its graduate attributes‘an inter-disciplinary perspective’ and goes on to discuss that ‘students need an interinter-disciplinary perspective on their main discipline to provide them with the broad perspective required for becoming an effective citizen and being prepared for the varied and transitional nature

of working life’ In the examples presented here, it is apparent that there is an assumed link between interdisciplinary curricula and the development of skills appropriate for a twenty-first century workforce

Also in discussions of interdisciplinary curricula, a connection is often made to society’s big issues or modern problems The justification for the new University of Tasmania cur-riculum explains

Our curriculum reflects our belief that adherence to traditional disciplinary boundaries has potential limitations insofar as understanding contemporary economic, social and political problems To address these issues we encourage multi-disciplinary study to enhance stu-dents’ capacity to draw upon other norms and models of understanding (2015)

Echoing these moves towards interdisciplinarity, many universities across the Australian higher education sector have introduced courses that by design are entirely interdisciplin-ary, in addition to a range of single interdisciplinary subjects Examples include

Nanotechnology, Big Data, Sustainability, Cultural Studies, Ageing and Creative Indus-tries Such courses and subjects, designed to teach students about societies complex pro-blems, align with Frodeman (2014, 151) proposition that‘recent changes implemented by some universities indicate a response to pressures from outside to be more responsive to the so-called“grand challenges”’

It is clear that there is much interest in interdisciplinarity and many arguments are posited for the inclusion of interdisciplinarity in education Yet in spite of this interest, there is little discussion in government and institutional documents and the literature that investigates what knowledge is taught in interdisciplinary curricula and how this com-pares to discipline-based curricula Instead, there is an assumption that there is a beneficial difference and rather there is a focus on the skills that stem from interdisciplinary learning One of the implications of this is that there is little understanding of what is lost or gained

in a move to more interdisciplinary curricula

In response to the growing move away from discipline-based knowledge and the increased emphasis on skills and vocational usefulness, recent arguments in education take a different focus on curriculum development The case for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ Young (2008) to discussions of the curriculum and for a‘knowledge-based curri-culum’ (Young and Muller2013) put forward by sociologists of education rooted in social realism has gained traction particularly over the past decade In order to gain a fuller understanding of what interdisciplinary curricula entails and how the knowledge taught

in interdisciplinary and discipline-based curricula differ, this paper presents findings from two projects that took a focus on knowledge

Project background

In order to provide a perspective on the kinds of knowledge that are taught in interdisci-plinary curricula, this paper draws on interview data from two different projects Thefirst project is an Australia Research Council funded project, Knowledge Building Across School and University The aim of this project was to investigate the changing form

of knowledge and knowledge-building in schools and universities through a focus on tea-chers and academics associated with two traditional disciplines, history and physics These disciplines were selected as they are seen as two long-standing and traditionally prestigious and well-respected disciplines At the same time, together they offer different perspectives due to the different ways they are seen to organize knowledge, differences that have been theorized in a number of ways (e.g Becher and Trowler 2001; Bernstein 2000; Biglan

1973) These disciplines while having strong histories are not static, and so the project used them as a way of capturing knowledge work and how teachers and academics in these disciplines see their agendas and practices in current times Over the course of the project, 50 semi-structured interviews were undertaken with history and physics aca-demics from a range of universities across Australia

The second project examined in detail how six academics go about teaching the same topics in both discipline-based subjects and in interdisciplinary subjects The academics came from a range of disciplines– physics, history, philosophy, visual arts, economics and ecology Data were collected over two semi-structured interviews with each of the aca-demics Thefirst interview dealt with each academic’s broad perceptions of teaching, their discipline, interdisciplinarity and the types of students the academics were seeking to

produce within their own discipline and their interdisciplinary teaching For the second interview, academics chose a topic they taught within both a discipline-based and inter-disciplinary subject and were asked to describe what was taught in each context As an example, the physicist chose to compare the teaching of‘energy’ to first-year physics stu-dents and to first-year students studying the interdisciplinary unit An Introduction to Climate Change Curriculum documents and assessment were also analysed This study addressed specifically what knowledge is taught in interdisciplinary studies and how this compares to the knowledge that is taught in disciplinary studies and provides insight into what these two different contexts offer students and whether this constitutes

a different knowledge set

The interviews for both projects were transcribed in full and annotated, paying atten-tion to what was said and interpreting meaning in dialogue with the literature Bernstein’s work on the classification and framing of knowledge, discussed below, was used to code the data

Bernsteinian concepts of classification and framing

The work of Basil Bernstein in the sociology of education on the classification and framing

of knowledge is useful in this paper for understanding how the knowledge in interdisci-plinary curricula differs from that in disciinterdisci-plinary curricula For Bernstein, classification refers to the boundaries between categories; it provides the structure of curriculum (1971,1975, 2000) A strongly classified category will therefore be insulated from other categories, whereas the boundaries of a weakly classified category are not necessarily defined or recognizable ‘In the case of strong classification, each category has its unique identity, its unique voice, its own specialized rules of internal relations’ (Bernstein

2000, 7)

Framing regulates how knowledge, skills and dispositions are taught and learned within particular contexts Who has control over communication, pace, sequence, form and assessment A subject that is strongly framed is one in which the teacher more clearly has control A subject that is weakly framed is less hierarchical and the roles of the students and teachers are less clearly demarcated

Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing are used in this paper to describe knowledge in discipline-based and interdisciplinary curricula and provide a means to compare these two contexts

Interdisciplinarity in practice

Without exception the academics interviewed, in both projects, believed that there is a place for interdisciplinary work in university education and in particular want students

to form a broad understanding of different disciplines In both projects, academics dis-cussed the increasingly specialized nature of their disciplines and the complexity of the knowledge with which they are now faced and how this often requires an interdisciplinary approach to understand There was a sense that academics were keen to see students thinking about complex interdisciplinary ideas and issues and to understand how different disciplines can contribute to these, particularly amongst those academics that had been involved in interdisciplinary teaching A number talked passionately about specific

interdisciplinary topics such as climate change and their desire to see students graduate with the ability to contribute to public discussions around some of these bigger and current issues in society So academics see justification for interdisciplinary curriculum

as both epistemic and also as important in providing students with an understanding of the‘grand challenges’

Thefirst project however raised a numbers of issues in relation to interdisciplinary cur-ricula, particularly around its justification, structure and depth Academics were cynical about the push towards larger generalist and interdisciplinary programmes in the univer-sity curriculum that are driven by more instrumental justifications such as a focus on generic skills, employability and student appeal

Unfortunately, in this day and age, we are driven more towards focusing upon the utility of what we teach I prefer not to talk about disciplines in utilitarian terms I’d much rather talk about disciplines as being very sophisticated, well established ways of viewing the world through a particular perspective, or set of perspectives Sometimes that suffers in the drive

to create mass programs that have mass appeal that are focused upon vocational utilitarian outcomes and that argument struggles sometimes (Project 1 Academic 29 Historian)

The setting up of interdisciplinary majors to attract students in what is seen to be a current and trendy topic with a more identifiable employment trajectory was an example dis-cussed by a number of physicists interviewed Physics has in recent decades at times struggled to maintain numbers and in an effort to attract students’ specialist majors such as nanotechnology have been introduced as they are seen to hold both currency and appeal for students However no one interviewed, even those who had been recruited

to set up such courses, thought that a course structured in terms of a new form of inter-disciplinarity or a contemporary problem such as nanotechnology was a satisfactory repla-cement for a straight disciplinary major These types of programmes were seen to produce

a temporary upsurge of student demand, then that falls away as other things become fashionable

Curricula with a greater focus on more instrumental concerns denote a weakening of the classification of knowledge boundaries as there is less insulation between educational knowledge and everyday knowledge Some studies have shown that a weakening in classi-fication can lead to a reduction in the depth of knowledge students’ encounter through the emptying out of content and undermining of coherence within curriculum (Beck2002; Muller2016) This issue of depth of knowledge in interdisciplinary curricula was raised

in the interviews by a number of academics Many believed that interdisciplinary subjects and degrees do not give the‘problem portable’ foundations of a more traditional physics degree

so a lot of these nanotechnology courses started probably as undergraduate courses We had one here The students come in They do a little bit of Physics, a little bit of Chemistry, a little bit of Biology, a little bit of, Material Science And what ultimately happens is at the end they come out and they are jack of all trades and masters of none (Project 1 Academic 23 Physics)

If you want to do, you know, a bioscience, like a biophysics type project, and there’s many important questions in biophysics But you have to be very careful about expecting or taking a student into an area like that, because then they don’t, you find that in the end they don’t have training in either Whereas the more successful interdisciplinary scientists have always come from one field, because they have a very good understanding of one field, then they can get a knowledge of the other field, and they, it’s sufficient to engage

workers in thatfield, and that’s when the better discoveries are made (Project 1 Academic 12 Physics)

The inclusion of multiple disciplinary perspectives within an interdisciplinary subject or major was seen as problematic as such a structure does not provide students with enough time and exposure to develop a strong understanding in one discipline let alone multiple disciplines So there was concern around the reasons for introducing interdisci-plinary subjects and majors that do not provide students with the depth achieved through

a more detailed study within a single discipline The value of having a strong discipline-based foundation prior to pursuing interdisciplinary work was a reoccurring theme in the interviews

I think it’s really important the students are given the discipline I think a discipline is, that what we call the discourse community of historians or linguists or people in literacy studies

or whatever, those discourse communities are significant and can’t be wished away by cross disciplinary thought And I’ve taught too many subjects which are cross-disciplinary to think

it’s possible to actually do that I think the disciplines exist because the generic rules that underpin them are real, they’re not – and they’re constructs of a lot of people’s work over generations so they’re sort of like, it doesn’t disappear overnight However, I think once a student has become good at history or good at psychology or good at sociology, they are then in a position to draw on other disciplines very easily (Project 1 Academic 7 History)

Academics believed that students benefit most from a nuanced consideration of ciplinarity that builds on strong disciplinary foundations The issue of depth in interdis-ciplinary curricula was also afinding in the second project Through the interviews with academics and analysis of curriculum and assessment documents, it was shown that when topics are taught in interdisciplinary subjects that they are not covered to the same depth

as would be taught within a discipline-based subject The content that is covered in inter-disciplinary subjects may be more diverse, yet it comes at the cost of depth of inter-disciplinary knowledge For example, the historian interviewed for the second project described the differences between teaching a history subject and her interdisciplinary subject

The difference is that if you’re teaching history, a history subject to history students, you’re going into a lot more complexity of detail into the historiography into the various interpret-ations about and so on… So you can’t do that in this sort of subject So it’s a question of simplifying what you’re doing and certainly you don’t want to call it dumbing down but you’re drilling things down into central ideas (Project 2 Historian)

And the economist interviewed discussed how when teaching the topic‘incentives’ to his microeconomics students he would discuss the limits of this concept to a much greater extent than he would when teaching the same idea in his interdisciplinary subject The Wealth of Nations In comparing a topic that academics taught in both a discipline-based subject and an interdisciplinary subject all of the academics interviewed for the second project discussed leaving out of their interdisciplinary teaching, the limitations

of aspects of the topic

Another difference in how these academics taught the same topic in the two different contexts was that in their interdisciplinary teaching they omitted particular concepts or how the topic related to other topics within their discipline The physicist, in his compari-son of teaching the topic of energy tofirst-year physics students and his interdisciplinary climate change students, revealed that he does not explicitly teach the law of conservation

of energy to his climate change students This however was seen as a central concept in his discipline-based teaching As recommended by many in the literature (e.g Davies, Devlin and Tight2010; Franks et al.2007; Klein and Doty1994; Newell1994), many interdisci-plinary courses and subjects are organized around an overarching theme, topic or ques-tion This study revealed that academics only include knowledge they believe is relevant

to the overarching theme or topic of their interdisciplinary subject For this reason the limits of the ideas taught and their relations to other concepts and topics are excluded

As the academics have tied the knowledge taught tightly to the overarching theme of their interdisciplinary subjects, rather than abstracting the knowledge from the context, the knowledge is weakly classified The leaving out of the limitations and relationships

in interdisciplinary curricula aligns with Bernstein’s idea that sustained strongly classified work is often required so that students can become familiar with the‘specialised rules of internal relations’ (Bernstein 2000, 7) As Winch (2013) discusses, curriculum needs to provide induction into the process of limits and the relationships of a subject and‘the pro-cedures required to gain and to validate knowledge’ (13) Muller also discusses, ‘Knowing which concepts refer to which other concepts, and their implications, are what knowing a subject is about’ (2016, 81) This was found to be undertaken to a greater extent within discipline-based subjects and echoes the concerns raised in thefirst project that interdis-ciplinary subjects do not develop a strong foundational understanding

The interviews with the academics in the first project revealed that many academics believed that interdisciplinarity was best done in the later years of undergraduate or at post-graduate and research levels This then allows students to develop a stronger disciplin-ary understanding before moving more successfully into interdisciplindisciplin-ary areas Others felt that a small amount of interdisciplinary coursework at the undergraduate level was reason-able as long as it did not crowd out the ability to form a strong base of knowledge

I think afirst good time to introduce students with the principals of interdisciplinary work would be with the higher years of undergraduate study Because I think it could be very con-fusing to students Studentsfirst need, they need to understand the basics of the discipline they’re majoring in, before you can actually talk about cross-disciplinary work (Project 1 Academic 34 History)

I think that in the intellectual sphere it’s very helpful that people have an awareness of and a deep understanding of one particular disciplines way of thinking as their base And then they expand out to taste other people’s ways of thinking But I think that that is a better basis for us

to proceed on than trying to create a melded product at the undergraduate level Because all you get then is mediocre physics or mediocre biology… (Project 1 Academic 4 Physics)

This does not mean that academics were against interdisciplinary subjects such as environ-mental studies and the like at undergraduate– they think there is a need for students to get some exposure to a biggerfield and types of questions that they might want to specialize in but they do not want this to crowd out more structured foundations for deep understanding While many acknowledged that addressing big challenges such as climate change may require interdisciplinary approaches, and while there was recognition that interdisciplinary collaborations can be fruitful and rewarding, the academics interviewed were consistent in their belief that their primary contribution to these lies in their disciplinary expertise:

… it’s very easy to say, you know, that the big problems are in climate change Which is true, that’s where they are, they’re in climate change and they’re in water, they’re in renewable