By Daniel Mulcare
Department of Political Science

Last year, I participated in a Faculty Learning Community, a diverse group of Salem State College faculty that was set up to facilitate conversation and community.¹ In our sessions, we explored the multifaceted nature of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL), a cross-disciplinary research methodology that seeks to enable professors 1) to analyze critically their own pedagogy, 2) to utilize their own disciplinary methods to explore teaching practices, and 3) to share their methodologies and findings with faculty members across disciplines in both informal and formal academic settings.²

As part of this Faculty Learning Community, we were required to set up our own SOTL project. After some consideration, I chose to look at the pedagogy of Team-Based Learning to see whether the claims of its supporters would work within the context of a Political Science classroom.³ I knew that there were others on campus who employed this technique in their courses, and because of my positive experiences with the Faculty Learning Community model, I recruited them into the study of Team-Based Learning. Our Faculty Research Community (FRC) now includes roughly ten Salem State professors, who derive from every school and numerous departments.

When I initially described this FRC to these participants, other professors, and Salem State administrators, I frequently claimed that, because the group contained faculty members from numerous departments, the FRC was interdisciplinary. In putting forth this statement, I linked our project to the movement at Salem State to make our institution more interdisciplinary. Similar to the development of faculty and student learning communities, plans for interdepartmental co-taught courses and a more interdisciplinary approach to the core curriculum, I viewed the TBL Faculty Research Community as a way to seriously promote the concept of collaborative teaching and learning. As I continued to think about FRCs and SOTL projects, I realized that they did not fit neatly into the history of interdisciplinarity and the main principles of this theoretical approach. Indeed, instead of defining professors’ research communities or studies of teaching and learning as interdisciplinary, I concluded that these efforts can best be termed collaborative or multidisciplinary. In this essay, I will explore how I came to this position.

Origins of Interdisciplinarity

SOTL projects and FRCs cannot be easily placed into the sphere of interdisciplinarity because they do not fit into the legacy of this scholarly approach. Interdisciplinary studies (IDS) came out of the political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, mainly around the scholarship that 1) emerged to challenge U.S. Cold War foreign policy and 2) supported movements for civil rights for blacks, Chicanos, women, and gays and lesbians. Many proponents of these causes pushed against traditional academic boundaries: For them, disciplinary lines were inadequate to facilitate their research, the epistemological assertions that underpinned traditional scholarship were found wanting, and they struggled with departmental gatekeepers and journal editors who not recognize IDS inquiry as legitimate field of study. To legitimize their scholarly approach, interdisciplinary practitioners were forced outside of traditional departments and standard institutional structures (Yudice 1996; Katz 2001).

Contemporary Visions of Interdisciplinarity

Like many “outsider” movements, a more corporatist vision of interdisciplinarity has taken root in the academy. As the Cold War diminished with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the various civil rights movements won key political, social and cultural victories, interdisciplinary studies became a more recognized part of academic institutions. Additionally, as intellectuals shifted their focus towards interdisciplinary questions of globalization, cosmopolitanism, diversity, and multiculturalism, administrators, including those at Salem State, looked to these themes as they framed their vision of student success. From this perspective, students would be best able to flourish in the contemporary job market if they could immerse themselves in different cultures, communicate with people of various backgrounds, and use multiple methodologies when they approached specific tasks. Interdisciplinarity, then, was not necessarily a tool to challenge the existing power structure; rather it was the means to succeed within contemporary social and political institutions (Katz 1975; Yudice, 1996).

SOTL, FRCs and Interdisciplinary History

At best, SOTL research and FRCs have only a tangential place within this IDS history. They are much more politically neutral than traditional interdisciplinary literature, and they do not directly challenge the departmental structures of contemporary higher education. That said, there are areas where SOTL research and the FRCs that support it relate to those struggles that spurred the IDS movement and that animate it today. For instance, SOTL scholarship is normative in the sense that many of these studies on new pedagogical approaches are often rooted in the attempt to give voice to those, like minority and first-generation college students, who traditionally have been disenfranchised in the halls of academia. Additionally, like IDS scholars, SOTL practitioners have not always found it easy to get their work published. As an example, in my own discipline of Political Science, it has taken many years for SOTL research (including studies that explore effective ways to teach civic education) to be recognized as a valid, if somewhat secondary, sphere of inquiry.⁴

Lastly, while many SOTL projects and collaborative faculty research initiatives resemble contemporary corporatist uses of interdisciplinarity to promote student success, the overlapping visions are not part of a coherent social movement. As such, despite the similarities between the development of SOTL and IDS scholarship, the challenges faced by practitioners of SOTL projects only faintly resemble the cleavages created through struggles over interdisciplinarity.

Interdisciplinary Research’s Methodological Approach

While SOTL research projects can enrich conversations about how to integrate interdisciplinary approaches into the core curriculum (for example, how to implement co-taught classes), SOTL itself lacks the specific methodological approach associated with interdisciplinarity. To be interdisciplinary is not simply to read texts from other fields, use a concept from another discipline, or even work with colleagues from other departments on a research project. Rather than grafting a single tool from another field onto one’s own disciplinary approach, interdisciplinarity requires that scholars integrate concepts from other fields into their own. When this merging occurs, it is much more difficult to place the research project within a single discipline; rather it is truly an amalgam of various methodologies (Lyon 1992; Henkel 1996; Katz 2001).⁵

Because a scholar’s SOTL project often is separate from the discipline in which the person received a degree, the project often will not employ concepts from that discipline. The Team-Based Learning FRC in which I am involved is a good example. In this group, the participants come from many departments, and with such diversity, we could be viewed as interdisciplinary. However, in our conversations about the project and its methodology, we tend not to bring our respective disciplines’ concepts into the mix. Certainly, we all have gained an appreciation for how business, liberal arts, education and science professors explain their disciplines’ concepts to their students, but we have not integrated these ideas into our study. Additionally, we have not merged these disciplinary approaches into our own work or the material that we present to our classes. As a result, our group is best defined as a collaboration of individuals from multiple disciplines; we are not inherently interdisciplinary.

Concluding Thoughts: Interdisciplinarity and Academic Institutional Structures

As we think about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning or Faculty Research Communities at Salem State, it is important that we separate out SOTL projects and FRCs from our understanding of interdisciplinarity. In doing so, we will be able to re-conceptualize the various collaborative projects that Salem State faculty and administrators will undertake in the coming years. It is important to make this distinction because interdisciplinary work creates different institutional dynamics than multi-disciplinary FRCs. Professors engaged in Faculty Research Communities will compete over institutional resources such as research grants, travel money and the awards that their teaching and research bring to the campus, and professors who participate in SOTL scholarship continue to struggle to gain legitimacy within their respective disciplines, which in many cases have not fully accepted their research as equal to more traditional fields of inquiry. These conflicts, though, are of a different type than those that emerge from a real push towards interdisciplinarity. Because interdisciplinary scholarship tends towards integration rather than separation, implementing this principle throughout the academy is more likely to call into question the higher education’s entire divisional framework. Instead of mere competition over grants and travel money, increased interdisciplinary programs will produce substantive reorganization; they will likely affect 1) how each department is structured, 2) the formation of the college’s curriculum, 3) the number of faculty hires and 4) the availability of office space, classrooms, and so forth. As a supporter of interdisciplinarity, I do not make this point to raise alarms; rather I am merely trying to highlight the fundamental differences between mulit-disciplinary work and a true interdisciplinary project. By making this distinction, we can map out the types of institutional work ahead of us as we construct multidisciplinary SOTL projects and interdisciplinary programs.

This article is part of ASpect’s December 2009 issue on interdisciplinarity.

Works Cited

Brown, Linda Keller. 1975. American Studies at Douglass College: One vision of interdisciplinarity. American Quarterly. 27: 342-353.

Henkel, Jacqueline. 1996. Defining interdisciplinarity. PMLA. 111: 278-9.

Katz, Cindi. 2001. Response: Disciplining interdisciplinarity. Feminist Studies. 27:519-525.

Lyon, Arabella. 1992. Interdisciplinarity: Giving up territory. College English. 54: 681-693.

McKinney, Kathleen. 20007 Enhancing learning through the scholarship of teaching and learning: The challenges and joys of juggling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bas.

Michaelsen, Larry K., Arletta Bauman Knight, and L. Dee Fink, ed. 2002. Team-based learning: A transformative use of small groups in college teaching. Westport: Praeger Publishers.

Yudice, George. 1996. Defining interdisciplinarity. PMLA. 111: 275-6.

2 For a full treatment of the purpose of SOTL projects, see McKinney (2007).

3 Team Based Learning is a pedagogy that emphasizes a particular form of group learning. In it, the instructor, rather than lecturing, teaches through individual and group quizzes on the readings (called Readiness Assessment Tests), in-class assignments that emphasize the section’s main themes, simultaneous reporting of teams’ thinking on each task, and more substantive team projects that reinforce the course goals. TBL proponents assert that this pedagogy increases students’ preparation, enhances their retention of course material and promotes their attendance. The main TBL text is Michaelsen, Knight, and Fink (2002).

4 Because many Research 1 Institutions still do not view SOTL projects as major area for scholarly inquiry, there is an opening for academics at institutions like Salem State to make advances in this field.

5 I would like to thank Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, who provided me with a solid description of interdisciplinarity and enabled me to work through some of the questions that I had with this concept.