Revised Interdisciplinary Studies Program Seeks Answers to the Really Big Questions
When does life begin? What is race? What does it mean to be a good steward of the environment? How can we tackle systemic poverty? The common thread shared by all these questions is the inability to respond to them using a single mode of thought. For example, thinking like a scientist won’t give you the ethical perspective on the beginnings of life, and thinking like an economist can’t fully address the issues surrounding systemic poverty. These kinds of questions, the questions Lawrenceville students are destined to encounter in the “real world” after college, require an approach that combines several ways of thinking, an approach that incorporates several distinct academic disciplines—an interdisciplinary approach.
“The Interdisciplinary Studies Department evolved because there were a lot of questions the School thought were important for students to explore that didn’t fit an existing department,” explains Peter Becker, who began chairing the program in 2007. Now, says Becker, the department is evolving again in response to 21st-century demands for leaders who can synthesize ideas from different disciplines in order to resolve complex issues. Rather than a department with defined courses, an Interdisciplinary Studies Program will work across departmental lines to craft courses that foster understanding of each academic discipline as a distinct way of looking at a question or problem. The existing Interdisciplinary Studies courses will be phased out at the end of the 2008-2009 academic year.
“In this new paradigm,” says Becker, “it will be apparent to students that a historian has a different way of approaching a question than an economist or a literary critic, but it also will be apparent that all three ways of thinking need to be integrated to fully understand a time period or a problem. Each discipline is a distinct way of knowing.”
According to Becker, cross-fertilization between departments is as much a goal for faculty as it is for students. “Seeing two masters of their respective disciplines around the Harkness table, modeling what it’s like to discuss a problem across disciplinary lines, is the best possible experience for students, but it is also completely invigorating for faculty,” he emphasizes. “For a student to witness and engage in this process is at the core of what we aim to do as a school; for faculty, it’s more work, more time, but it’s energizing in the best possible way.”
English Master Wilburn (Bill) Williams and Science Master Leah Domb can attest to the latter. In spring 2009 they will be co-teaching an interdisciplinary course simply called “Race” for the third time in as many years. “The students in my Human Evolution class were stunned to discover how biologically similar the races are and kept asking questions about the origins of racism,” Domb explains. “I realized we could teach a course just on this topic but wasn’t sure about highlighting such a hot-button issue. I approached Bill about it and he thought a course on race would be well-received, but he also believed there needed to be a social science as well as a hard science aspect to it.”
Bill Williams is an English Master who majored in history as an undergrad at Amherst and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale, writing his doctoral dissertation on the African-American poet Melvin B. Tolson. Along the way he tested a major in biology, immersed himself in American literature, and made an extensive study of slavery, colonialism in Africa and the problem of race. Leah Domb is a Science Master and Harvard Ph.D. whose specialty is evolutionary biology. She and her husband Gil, a documentary filmmaker, have led a series of Spring Break trips to Africa’s Serengeti Plain as the finale to a winter term course on the region’s role in conservation biology and our own evolutionary history.
“Science tells us that humans are all much more alike than other species, but society suggests the existence of unbridgeable, permanent gulfs between the races,” Williams contends. “How is this incredible paradox possible? Students are astonished to discover how recently in modern history the concept of racial difference emerged, how it was invented to serve political and economic interests, and how science has been manipulated to propagate racial myths and stereotypes.”
Working side-by-side, Williams and Domb show students how to apply the lessons of history and the lessons of science to the same problem, and how blending the two can lead to a deeper understanding of underlying issues. Students learn new ways of looking at the world—for example, how social pressures can influence the interpretation of scientific data. They also benefit from expert instruction in the learning process itself, as two accomplished masters model the intellectual dialogue that leads to critical thinking. The masters acknowledge the challenges of team teaching but say they learn something new every time they teach the course. “We haven’t taught it the same way once,” Williams affirms.
Until this year, students were required to earn the first of two interdisciplinary credits during their Third Form year and the second in the Fourth or Fifth Form. Now, however, as the courses have become more sophisticated, students will earn both their interdisciplinary credits in the Fourth or Fifth Form. “We expect these to be among the most interesting and most demanding courses the School offers,” notes Becker. “Interdisciplinary courses are no longer simply those that don’t fit within a specific department.”
If the new approach to interdisciplinary studies sounds a lot like the existing Capstone Program, there’s good reason for that. “Interdisciplinary Studies and the Capstone are siblings,” says Becker. “The Capstone is a good model for what a truly interdisciplinary course should be—taught by multiple faculty from different departments, with outside speakers for additional real-world perspective. As many interdisciplinary courses as possible will follow the Capstone model.”