I’ve been working in academia for over 25 years, but I’ve never found my intellectual home until now. In September, I had the privilege of attending the Copenhagen Autumn School on Governance, Design, and Delivery of Interdisciplinary Higher Education. It was easily the best, most exciting and energising work week I have ever had. I’ve studied collaboration and interdisciplinarity for years, but have always felt rather on the sidelines at disciplinary conferences. This is probably because interdisciplinarity, by definition, sits between disciplines rather than being a core part of any single discipline.
The week brought together an international group of academics from a range of disciplines, all of whom were absorbed by interdisciplinary higher education. There were people who theorise and research it, people who deliver it, and people involved in governance. I felt recognised and understood, I felt valued, and I valued everyone else there. It felt like we all “got” each other: we were all excited by the same ideas and the same questions, and we were all excited by the different and unique perspectives that we all brought to the table. I felt that I had finally found my tribe, and it was a relief to find out that others felt this to. I’d always wondered whether there was a party going on without me, but it turns out we were all hanging around in different places, wondering where the party was happening. I guess this is why the experience of coming together was so powerful.
The way the workshop was designed really embodied what I see as the values of interdisciplinarity. Everybody was both learner and contributor: someone described it as more of a retreat than an autumn school. All voices and all experiences were valued; it was inclusive on both an intellectual and practical level. The workshop activities designed by colleagues were also loads of fun, and prompted excellent and insightful conversation and discussion. It was really active and every session got us thinking. There was lots of discussing, some working on our own; all of it was inspiring and designed to help us connect our learning to our own experiences. This workshop was both stimulating for my thinking about interdisciplinarity, and providedexcellent pedagogical models (many of which I will be taking forward into my own practice). Taking a step back and getting a bit meta, I wonder whether there’s something inherently interdisciplinary about creating a space where everyone is both an expert and a learner?
The week brought together (in no particular order!) philosophers, evaluators, psychologists, cultural theorists, a range of STEM academics, educational researchers, and more – and people from across the range of career stages. There were so many unexpected connections between my own work and others’ thinking, which was just super exciting. One of the (many!) things I loved about the week was being challenged to make my assumptions explicit and to recognise the myriad of ways in which we think about interdisciplinary what it is and how we best do it. My own understanding and valuing of interdisciplinarity is only one among many! This realisation also brought to the fore one of the key challenges of researching the field, that was encapsulated in a point made by a colleague on the last day: because interdisciplinary teaching happens and is written about in so many diverse and dispersed disciplinary contexts, it is really difficult to navigate and build on the literature in our own work. This means that building an academic community around interdisciplinarity is so important, as it can help us build bridges between those dispersed literatures.
I could write reams more about the specific ideas that I brought home from the workshop: thinking about whether interdisciplinarity actually resides in individuals, in teams, in projects, or in relationships; thinking about what kind of interdisciplinarians are we helping students to become; thinking about how we encourage and support different types of interdisciplinary education; and so much more. But really, I wanted this blog to be about the joy of the Autumn School and to celebrate the amazing people who came together.
Jo is leading a series of four BILT-funded workshops on Interdisciplinary Education, click below for more information and booking link:
- Workshop 1: Models of interdisciplinary teaching
- Workshop 2: Student experience
- Workshop 3: Assessment in interdisciplinary teaching
- Workshop 4: Identity and transformation
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