ABSTRACT
In this session, we will discuss various opportunities, pitfalls and best practices for interdisciplinary approaches to thesis writing for students who have not participated in interdisciplinary education. How can we make interdisciplinary research more accessible to all students interested, including those from disciplinary programs? We input the discussion with findings from our pilot study conducted at Utrecht University (UU), working towards answers to questions like ‘What does it take to make an interdisciplinarian?’ ‘How can disciplinary learning prepare for interdisciplinarity?’
Relevance and pilot description
At (UU), students write a discipline-based bachelor thesis – except when they participate in an interdisciplinary program. With the growing interest of students in joining interdisciplinary master programs, the increasing number of those programs, and the wicked questions that society poses, we felt the need to give bachelor students from all bachelor programs the opportunity to experiment with an interdisciplinary approach to their bachelor thesis. Specifically, we aimed to explore how we can help students from various humanities programs to adopt an interdisciplinary approach while their program did not offer extensive education on interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary research. The challenge for them is to get a grip on what interdisciplinary approaches might entail, to fit that into their program’s idea of disciplinary thesis quality, and still have space to experience what an interdisciplinary approach means while already working on their thesis.
To explore the potential for a thesis construction where students with no or very little experience with interdisciplinary research could write a thesis with interdisciplinary approach, we designed two pilot programmes for students of various Humanities bachelor programs. The design followed the principles of constructive alignment. First, students were invited to join a pressure cooker workshop on interdisciplinary research. During this three-hour workshop, we discussed students’ disciplinary grounding, reasons for doing interdisciplinary research, we practiced formulating an interdisciplinary research question, and possible routes for integrating two or more disciplines to answer such question. Students and their supervisors, who sometimes also joined the pressure cooker workshop, were then given guidance for reflection throughout the thesis process and assessment guidelines to help grasp what was expected of them (in comparison to the disciplinary guidelines). We also offered students and supervisors online consultation moments to help solve problems or answer questions. Students used those opportunities, for example, to brainstorm about their research topic and question. At the end of the thesis writing period, students handed in their thesis and a reflection document in which they present how they have dealt with issues and questions arising during the thesis writing. Students received a certificate for participating and filled out an evaluation form.
Throughout all parts of the pilot, we took notes on the process, students’ reactions, etc. and held intervision sessions with supervising teachers. Carien, who is an educational advisor, evaluated the final writing products (thesis, reflection report) to see what kind of theses resulted from the pilot programme and what the difficulties and gains were for students.
Summary of findings and ways toward impact
We present a few key results of the pilot rounds. We discuss next questions and steps during the conference session:
1. Cooperation between various bachelor programs helped to see the various needs and restrictions of students throughout Humanities programs.
2. The pressure-cooker interdisciplinarity workshops worked well. Participation of faculty and students together was very helpful for supervisors. The complete list of integration techniques we used seemed too high for students who had never done disciplinary reflection (see 3). We are looking for an appropriate workshop format for specific educational contexts (e.g. basic research courses).
3. Students find it difficult to talk about their field as a discipline. The disciplinary self-reflection turned out to be completely new way of looking at their own field. Our project seems to make clear that consciously and explicitly speaking about what binds and distinguishes disciplines is a prerequisite for the next step. In a follow-up, extra attention is needed for exploring disciplinary grounding.
4. We have experimented with approaches to interdisciplinarity in professional literature (e.g. Repko & Szostak 2021). We translated that for the pressure cooker workshop in pilot round 2 into a new list of components of a disciplinary perspective: phenomena, theory of knowledge, assumptions, concepts, theories, methods, societal relevance.
5. We created an overlay to help teachers assess an interdisciplinary perspective in BA theses in disciplinary programs. We set the bar feasibly low: students are required to explain what different disciplines contribute to answering a (sub-)question and when they reflect on the process of considering, comparing and perhaps integrating some of the components from the above list. We are still evaluating this, but it seems that no new criteria are needed
6. Reflection by students on the process seems promising. The results of the second round will be in by June 2024.
DESCRIPTION OF THE SESSION DESIGN
The session is interactive, which affords exchange of ideas between everyone present.
- Introduction (5 min.).
- Visual exercise (5 min.): participants choose one association card from a range of cards (available from the game Dixit) which fits their experience or association with interdisciplinary approaches to thesis writing. They discuss their chosen cards in small groups.
- Interactive round to gain insight into participants’ relation to the topic (15 min.): Have they been involved in interdisciplinary thesis writing, if so, how? We start to make a list of pitfalls and best practices if those come up, to be added to throughout the session.
- Presentation pilot results (10 min.): those results (foreshadowed in the abstract) will link with the issues raised just before and will also input the following discussion.
- Discussion (25 min.): Based on the input so far, we have a plenary discussion around the following questions:
1. How can we make students aware of their disciplinary basis, which is prerequisite for integration of disciplines of some sort?
2. The differences between full-fledged interdisciplinary research and a thesis with an interdisciplinary approach are subtle and layered. When is an interdisciplinary approach successful?
- Rounding off (5 min.).
