This guest post is brought to us by Dr. Jillian Terry. Jillian is an Associate Professor (Education) at the LSE, where she is Co-Director of the LSE100, LSE’s flagship interdisciplinary course. In this post, Jillian is reflecting on the ASPIRE Network’s latest SoTL Circle – a frequent event series where academics get together to discuss one piece of SoTL. If you would like to participate in an ASPIRE SoTL Circle, join the network and you will be invited to all future events.
This month, ASPIRE Network hosted our third SoTL Circle event, and I was happy to facilitate our discussion following the great examples set by my ASPIRE colleagues Jeremy Moulton and Madeleine Le Bourdon in our first two circles. For this iteration, we branched out from the confines of Political Science and International Relations, as I chose Aaron Stoller’s article “A Case for Critical Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinarity as Democratic Education”, published in 2020 in Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies. The article makes some bold contentions about the value of interdisciplinary thinking for engaging students in education for deep democracy, and I hoped it would spark some interesting discussion amongst our community of teaching-focused Politics and IR scholars as we think about interdisciplinarity in our own teaching practice and the purpose of democratic education.
My first question for colleagues centred Stoller’s claim that education for democracy “requires the creation of more frequent and more purposeful encounters that bring disciplinarians into critical dialogue with one another and with their students” (p. 35). Stoller suggests that institutional barriers often prevent this from happening in practice, an argument that seemed to resonate with those in attendance for our discussion. We reflected on the vast differences between Stoller’s context (Colorado College, a small liberal arts college in the US) and most UK institutions, particularly as it relates to contact hours, timetabling, and course choice, all of which can be seen as key factors for successful interdisciplinary learning. Attendees questioned how we can reasonably consider embedding interdisciplinarity into our teaching when we so often have 10-week modules with minimal contact time, leading to considerations of depth versus breadth in disciplinary versus interdisciplinary content. Countering this, some colleagues suggested that the team-taught or collaboratively-taught courses they have been a part of where the teaching team crosses disciplines have been some of the most rewarding of their career – opportunities for cross-pollination of ideas, theories, and methodologies can be hugely meaningful for both teachers and students, despite the potential institutional barriers that often get in the way of this happening in practice.
The discussion eventually moved into the space of considering “dialogue across difference” in our teaching, and I asked how (and whether) opportunities for such dialogue appear in our own pedagogical commitments (either within or across disciplines). Here, colleagues reflected on class and seminar discussion dynamics that often privilege extroverted students and can lead to silences or stilted conversation, particularly when the topic is more conceptual or theoretical rather than based in an applied case study. A key insight of the discussion that I didn’t necessarily expect was consensus around the idea that dialogue across difference often happens most effectively and meaningfully in spaces outside the classroom. Extracurricular spaces such as departmental socials and student society events often lead to deep and thoughtful conversations between students and academic staff across disciplinary boundaries. For instance, a colleague at the University of Glasgow referenced their Politics student society’s weekly “Pints & Politics” sessions, featuring academics from across the university who speak and answer questions on a political topic of their choice. Colleagues who were in the virtual room from a range of institutions across the UK reflected on the value of these kinds of moments for students to think and discuss together, and on how removing the so-called ‘pressures’ of a seminar environment can lead to more productive and inclusive dialogue.
Ultimately, much of our conversation during the SoTL circle interrogated Stoller’s key claim that interdisciplinarity can help to constitute “the academy as a democratic space”. The early and intense specialisation that occurs in UK secondary and higher education was discussed at length here, particularly as we thought together about what conditions allow for true interdisciplinarity to flourish. Highly prescribed degree programmes and reduced contact hours due to institutional financial constraints act as key barriers, as does a marketised university environment where students take on a consumer mindset rather than one that privileges exploration and the pursuit of knowledge. We shared frustrations about this challenge, suggesting that Stoller’s aims of deep democratic education through interdisciplinarity may be difficult to achieve in our own contexts. This led the group to think about top-down versus bottom-up approaches to interdisciplinary learning in HE. I shared my own experiences of leading LSE100, which delivers interdisciplinary social science teaching at scale to 2,000 undergraduate students each year, and we considered how institutional commitment to such an initiative is a hugely meaningful enabling force. While bottom-up approaches may well be possible, overcoming structural barriers through support from university leadership was discussed as an important factor for achieving the kind of interdisciplinarity Stoller espouses in this paper.
I really valued the opportunity to have these conversations with colleagues working across a range of UK contexts. I appreciated the fact that those who came along were, for the most part, stepping outside their own comfort zones to read an article about interdisciplinarity (which focused on how students and academic staff can step outside their comfort zones!). While we may have left the SoTL circle with lingering questions about how such interdisciplinarity can be enacted at our own institutions, I think the conversation also led us to think more openly about what it means to educate for democracy, and whether/how we can do this both within and across our disciplines.