Sense and Sensation

When applied to education, the interdisciplinary act of teaching requires a different kind of deep knowledge and complexity. When students come from California and Korea, India and Idaho, New York and North Carolina, teachers must navigate enormous differences in academic experience and preparation.  How do we best welcome them?  How can we ensure they all have the opportunity to excel?  What makes up the essence of their shared experience?  These are questions of deep complexity—our own “wicked problems”—and they are questions no one teacher can answer.  Effective collaboration like the kind prompted by interdisciplinary work brings together disparate perspectives, moves us toward solutions, and inevitably brings us someplace new. While writing a song may not address real-world problems in the same way, it too expresses something of deep complexity—and it highlights the personal risk of collaboration. The workings of the heart and mind are moved sometim...

Image by Peter Nilsson and Brent Hale Bill Newell, co-founder of the Association of Interdisciplinary Studies and its Executive Director for over 30 years, agrees. Agreement, that is, is part of collaboration, and interdisciplinary work requires some agreeing. When describing true interdisciplinary work, Newell uses the word “interperspectival.” He says, “A discipline offers a perspective on the world: a way of evaluating knowledge. Interdisciplinary Studies draws on disciplinary perspectives and integrates their insights through construction of a more comprehensive understanding.” “There is the unfortunate presumption,” he continues, “that interdisciplinarity simply requires bringing people from different disciplines together and having them talk. Too often, the result of conversation between people with conflicting worldviews is that they agree to disagree. Or, they compromise. Interdisciplinary studies develops techniques for creating common ground that go way beyond ...

"Construction" designed by Diego Naive at the Noun Project Anyone interested in what successful collaboration looks like in a classroom might visit Deerfield’s American Studies class.  The integrated course has been team-taught by veteran teachers Frank Henry (English) and Bernie Baker (History) for over thirteen years. It’s two teachers in the same classroom with the same students for two periods in a row. They prep every class together, grade every assignment together, and even write comments on papers together; every returned essay has ink from two different pens on it. “There is no economy of time,” says Henry. “It’s not a more efficient way of teaching. But, the cost is negligible compared to what we believe students are getting out of it.”   The American Studies course began in the late ‘70s and had been taught by a string of other teachers. Frank Henry began teaching it when he arrived at Deerfield in 1982, and Baker joined when he came to Deerfield in ...