Abstract:
If students are to learn to be interdisciplinary thinkers, then there are a number of challenges that must be resolved. This paper isolates three challenges and illustrates how these might be resolved using excerpts from to draft of the interdisciplinary subject Reshaping Environments. The first challenge is to enable students to understand what interdisciplinarity is and why it is essential. The second main challenge is how to enable students to transcend their often simplistic personal epistemic conceptions which impede their ability to understand and integrate multiple perspectives. They tend to remain trapped in thinking there are right answers or it is all a matter of opinion, which prevents them from reaching a reasonable and creative balance of the multiple and conflicting perspectives from multiple disciplines. The third challenge is how to enable readers to think like expert interdisciplinarians, given that such thinking is abstract, complex and effectively invisible for students. The paper isolates principles for meeting these challenges, and then will illustrate how these principles can be made concrete, using excerpts from the chapter on interdisciplinary processes. Students can be stimulated to abandon their simplistic epistemic positions in favour of more sophisticated conceptions that can support interdisciplinary thinking if they are exposed to problems which cannot be resolved while they think in terms of absolute right and wrong or equally valid opinions. By presenting the questions that interdisciplinarians address when they are thinking through complex environmental issues, and by having students address these same questions, they begin to be interdisciplinarian thinkers.