In the eye of the beholder: Defining and studying interdisciplinarity in engineering education

Abstract

The philosophical, practical, and empirical literature on interdisciplinarity reveals that there is considerable debate about what "counts" as interdisciplinary teaching and research. Decisions about which theories and definitions to adopt have implications for how scholars define interdisciplinarity, what educators believe constitutes interdisciplinary education, and for what researchers choose to include and exclude in studies of the development of students' interdisciplinary competence. In this paper we present data excerpts from six detailed case studies that reveal the many, varied, and often conflicting, definitions of interdisciplinarity used by engineering administrators and faculty members in discussions of undergraduate educational activities intended to develop students' interdisciplinary competence. These definitions-in-use do not always align with theory-based definitions of interdisciplinarity, and they did not neatly align with the conceptualization of interdisciplinarity that guided our study. In this paper, we discuss the methodological challenge that multiple, competing conceptualizations of interdisciplinarity (and multidisciplinarity) posed for the research team, focusing specifically on the question of whether to include or exclude from our analyses faculty and administrators' reports on learning activities if the conceptualization of interdisciplinary undergirding those activities was not consistent with our study definition. We discuss the substantive impact of different decisions and report how the team ultimately resolved this problem in a way that was methodologically and theoretically defensible. Finally, we present examples (from the case study sites) of learning activities that might not meet a strict theoretical definition of interdisciplinary educational activities but that might promote the development of interdisciplinary competence by building skills that contribute to that competence. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010.