Can Interdisciplinarity Attract More Women and Minorities to Academia?
The word that comes up again and again is “resonate.” Whenever a discussion gets going about interdisciplinary research — whether in the social sciences or natural sciences — women and minorities often say the topic resonates with them. However, to date, there is no comprehensive research addressing the issue.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Dear all, At North Carolina A&T State University we are in the midst of a bold experiment in undergraduate education. We have changed our general education requirements such that they now are comprised of a set of core courses that are interdisciplinary in character. The courses are organized around learning objectives that the faculty identified as crucial skills for students to acquire to compete in the 21st century. Broadly defined these skills fall into communication, analytical reasoning (math/science), global awareness, and intercultural skills. You can visit our website and find the University Studies Program link under academic programs.
Our curriculum is modeled on the University Studies Program at Portland State, although I believe we are going further than Portland State managed (data and time will tell.) Our case at NCATSU is also important because we are a historically African American institution which still has 97% African Americans in the undergraduate student body.
The program was first implemented in Fall 2006 so we have only a few semesters of data on student learning. We cannot as of yet address the idea of whether minorities/women undergraduates are more attracted to or learn better from interdisciplinary topics. Certainly one of our problems will be a lack of a sufficient control (we may be able to compare retention and graduation rates at A&T before our program was implemented…but that doesn’t translate directly to whether the intedisciplinarity of our program would account for such a change.)
One of the greatest challenges we face is the dearth of scholars who actually conduct interdisciplinary research to teach in our interdisciplinary curriculum. We are constantly struggling with professors who talk the idea of interdisciplinarity, but revert to their disciplinary training and focus once they are in the classroom. In this sense, interdisciplinary scholars who would really like to teach in an interdisciplinary curriculum should keep an eye out for position announcements from UNST at NCATSU. In the last two years we expanded rapidly, so growth in the coming period will not continue at that pace. We are very interested in our faculty doing research that addresses both interdisciplinarity topics, but also the scholarship of teaching and learning in an interdisciplinary curriculum. If you have an interest, I encourage you to contact me for further information.
Sincerely,
Dr. Joseph L. Graves, Jr.
Dean, University Studies
November 21st, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Inderdisciplinarity may be more interesting then the traditional core subjects but the concept is useless if the students aren’t proficient in reading, writing and math. Further, when academics and school officials sell women’s studies, Africana studies or gender studies as majors they are completely neglecting the careers of those students who aren’t interested in pursuing a career at a university. We really do students a disfavor when we encoure or even require that they take courses that don’t have practical applications in the real world.