Round table discussion

Title: "The First Year Experience and Interdisciplinary Teaching: Meeting the Challenges”

Paul Makeham

The tertiary sector has embraced interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Carefully developed disciplinary boundaries which once dominated Universities are being challenged in almost every field, giving rise to some of the most exciting and stimulating work in the University. For First Year students, though, interdisciplinary teaching and learning creates particular challenges.

Interdisciplinary teaching must adopt Boyer’s (1990) “Scholarship of Integration” principle, namely “making connections across the disciplines, placing the specialties in larger context, illuminating data in a revealing way”. This is important in order that truly interdisciplinary understandings are achieved, as distinct from a set of multidisciplinary - but unintegrated - experiences. However, helping First Year students to learn one new and specialised disciplinary way of thinking is strenuous enough; learning and synthesising two or more disciplinary discourses poses an even more daunting challenge (Haynes, 2002). Moreover, while universities recognise the importance of interdisciplinary work, it is too often pursued and financed only after the university has fulfilled its obligations to the traditional disciplines.

The facilitator will adopt a groupwork approach to this discussion.