The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education Branches from the Same Tree (2018) / Chapter Skim
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5 Understanding and Overcoming the Barriers to Integration in Higher Education
5 Understanding and Overcoming the Barriers to Integration in Higher Education
Pages 95-106
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From page 95... ...
As such, they are exceptions to the status quo that prove that barriers to integration are not insurmountable. Though the committee does not believe there is a one-size-fits-all approach to overcoming barriers to integration, here we offer readers a practical framework for developing implementation strategies that can be catered to the local context of their specific institution.
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From page 96... ...
Yet, despite enthusiasm for interdisciplinary approaches in teaching and research, it has also been well documented that numerous factors tend to discourage interdisciplinary integration -- even within related fields. The vast majority of courses, even if cross-listed, are discipline-specific and not integrative: their content and learning goals are recognizable as particular to a single discipline, and they are taught by faculty members with training in that discipline who hold a teaching position in a disciplinary department (Jacobs and Frickel, 2009)
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From page 97... ...
With a few exceptions, most American universities have the same mix of departments, with broader professional disciplinary structures and individual university departments perpetuating each other. As already noted, the overwhelming majority of faculty hold Ph.D.s in the same field (i.e., from the same sort of department)
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From page 98... ...
Indeed, at many institutions faculty may be unable to count integrated course development and implementation toward their career advancement, and if integrated courses require significantly more time and labor than simply reproducing a standard, disciplinary course, faculty may not be able to afford the professional cost of such efforts. Reappointment, promotion, and tenure criteria often require faculty to meet teaching, research, and service expectations, all of which tend to be evaluated according to disciplinarily defined criteria and by senior members of their discipline.
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From page 99... ...
Thus, while questions remain about the extent of the benefits of integrative learning, disciplinary and institutional conservatism exerts a strong counterforce to the sorts of experimentation in integration that would help answer these questions. Another way that disciplinary structures exert this conservative effect is in the sheer effort required for faculty trained in those disciplines to acquire the opportunities and competencies necessary to teach integrative courses.
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From page 100... ...
Though rare, such opportunities can engender in faculty, as well as students, the capacity to achieve a sense of the critical limitations of a given disciplinary approach and recognize and explore the unoccupied intellectual territories and potentially transformative, yet unasked, questions that lie beyond the existing borders of disciplines. There are, however, some categories of faculty whose training makes them particularly well suited to teach integrative courses without requiring the extra resources needed for two faculty from traditional disciplines to co-teach a single course.
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From page 101... ...
This report catalogs and describes a diverse array of integrative programs and courses that demonstrate that overcoming some of the common barriers to integration is possible. These existing courses and programs can serve as models and offer lessons learned about how to implement integrative courses and programs; however, the committee believes that no one-size-fits-all "solution" exists for overcoming the b arriers to integration.
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From page 102... ...
We do not offer these examples as solutions, per se, but as conversation starters that will stir the pot, spark the imagination, and inspire faculty to ask further questions. EXISTING PRACTICES AIMED AT OVERCOMING COMMON BARRIERS TO INTEGRATION As we have already described, promotion and tenure criteria can serve as barriers to integration.
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From page 103... ...
In addition, Cognitive Science, an interdisciplinary study of human mental processes, includes pursuit of problems in reasoning, language comprehension, and visual recognition and involves the integration of disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and computer science. In addition, graduates of the Arid Lands Resource Sciences GIDP work in interdisciplinary fields that include international development; famine, famine early warning systems, and food security; land use, history, change, degradation, desertification, management, and policy; ethnoecology and other ethnosciences; economic and agricultural policy and development; borderlands issues; globalization; civil conflict; and urban development as they relate to the arid and semiarid lands of the world 2 See https://www.rit.edu/president/strategicplan2025/dimension5.html (accessed September 21, 2017)
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From page 104... ...
The graduate college provides administrative support and moderate levels of teaching assistantship support. The institutional budget model rewards departments and colleges by crediting faculty teaching in a GIDP course with the student credit hours and thus awarding the relevant tuition income to the college of the instructional faculty member.
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From page 105... ...
Collaborative teaching and research tend to happen more spontaneously because faculty from different disciplines may interact more frequently and informally simply by virtue of occupying the same building; serving together on administrative, hiring, and doctoral committees; and encountering each others' research in the context of departmental business like promotion and tenure reviews. Each of these settings has tended to offer opportunities for faculty to encounter and understand the approaches of colleagues from other disciplines, laying valuable but otherwise difficult to achieve foundations for offering integrative learning opportunities to students.
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From page 106... ...
Indeed, several of these examples are from institutions with which members of the committee are affiliated. We hope that these examples offer readers of this report a sense for how institutions can facilitate integration; however, we do not expect that the strategies that have worked at these schools will necessarily work at other institutions.
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