Education Commons^™

Breaking The Rule Of Discipline In Interdisciplinarity: Redefining Professors, Students, And Staff As Faculty, Alison Cook-Sather, Elliott Shore

Education Program Faculty Research and Scholarship

In this article we attempt to complicate traditional--and, we argue, limited and exclusionary--definitions of interdisciplinarity as the bringing into dialogue of established disciplines without questioning the parameters and practices of those disciplines. We propose that interdisciplinarity instead might mean teaching and learning among, between, and in the midst of those of innate or learned capacities--not only college faculty but also students and staff. To illustrate this more radical iteration of interdisciplinarity, we draw on a range of definitions of the key terms, “discipline” and “faculty,” and we offer a case study of a workshop we co-facilitated in which we brought …