Interdisciplinary learning

Sometimes, when he’s rereading his favorite Douglas Hofstadter book, my husband tries to get me estimate. How many blocks high is the Sears Tower? How many dumptrucks would it take to haul away Mt. Fuji?

I was thinking of those questions when I read this piece in the New York Times about a new interdisciplinary program at Binghamton University in New York that seeks to break down the never-ending divide between the disciplines:

It’s been some 50 years since the physicist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow delivered his famous “Two Cultures” lecture at the University of Cambridge, in which he decried the “gulf of mutual incomprehension,” the “hostility and dislike” that divided the world’s “natural scientists,” its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, from its “literary intellectuals,” a group that, by Snow’s reckoning, included pretty much everyone who wasn’t a scientist.

The estimation problems are an interesting bridge of this gap. I’m more of a “literary intellectual” than a scientist, and I start out frustrated because I think of them as being math problems that I simply don’t have enough information to solve. But they’re not. I have lots of information from things I’ve seen and done and read to start to figure out the answers.

Teachers talk a lot about the importance of interdisciplinary learning. But it takes a lot to figure out ways to authentically connect, say, math and literature.  The beauty of it is, once you’ve done it, the “math kids” will be more engaged with the literature and the “reading kids” will be more engaged with the math.  The Binghamton prof gives this example:

One goal of the initiative is to demystify science by applying its traditional routines and parlance in nontraditional settings — graphing Jane Austen, as the title of an upcoming book felicitously puts it. “If you do statistics in the context of something you’re interested in and are good at, then it becomes an incremental as opposed to a saltational* jump,” Dr. Wilson said. “You see that the mechanics are not so hard after all, and once you understand why you’re doing the statistics in the first place, it ends up being simple nuts and bolts stuff, nothing more.”

This is a big project for professional development providers and ed schools. Teachers need to learn to bridge between disciplines on their own before they can help their students to do it.

* A term in biology referring to an abrupt jump.

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