Multiple disciplinarity

In both the K to 12 curriculum and in the new General Education Curriculum (GEC), the words “multidisciplinary,” “interdisciplinary,” and “transdisciplinary” are used. These words do not all mean the same thing.

A simple way of distinguishing them is by using the adjectives mentioned in the series of articles written by Bernard Choi and A. W. Pak of the Public Health Agency of Canada in the journal “Clinical & Investigative Medicine,” entitled “Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in health research, services, education and policy.”

“The common words for multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary,” wrote Choi and Pak ten years ago, “are additive, interactive, and holistic, respectively.”

“Multidisciplinarity,” they wrote, “draws on knowledge from different disciplines but stays within their boundaries.”

Let me give my own example, relevant to the way Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are planning to implement the new GEC (when the TRO is lifted, of course), as well as to the coming presidential elections.

Let us say that students want to find out who the best candidate for president is. We could conduct a class on a Monday with a political science professor as the teacher. The political science will talk about governance, the Constitution, our election culture, and so on, all from the point of view of political science.

We could then conduct a class the next Wednesday with a literary theorist as the teacher. The literature professor will ask the class to read poems about power (a good one is Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody” with its characterization of the voting public as “an admiring bog”), looking at images and myths, all from the point of view of literary criticism.

We could finally conduct a class the next Friday with a mathematics professor as the teacher. The mathematics professor could show the class what the plus or minus phrase means in a statistical study and how to find out whether a survey of presidential preferences was actually a random one or a stratified random one or was merely a purposive one, all from the point of view of mathematics.

The class would then be multidisciplinary, with the students left to figure out for themselves how to integrate the insights from the different disciplines. In short, multidisciplinarity means that we add (“additive”) different disciplines but do not mix them up.

“Interdisciplinarity,” wrote Choi and Pak, “analyzes, synthesizes and harmonizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole.”

To be interdisciplinal, we would conduct all the three classes (on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) with all three professors attending. They would talk to each other, as in a panel discussion, building on or challenging each other’s insights. Depending on their particular perspectives within their disciplines, they might be able to provoke the students into thinking about the coming elections as a necessary myth to continue the imagined community that may or may not be truly representative of the will of the voting populace.

The class would then be interdisciplinal, with the students benefitting from the interaction (“interactive”) among the three specialists.

“Transdisciplinarity,” wrote Choi and Pak, “integrates the natural, social and health sciences in a humanities context, and transcends their traditional boundaries.”

We could also have only one professor, someone with a deep knowledge of two or more disciplines and with a working knowledge of many other disciplines, someone like Jose Rizal (ophthalmologist and novelist, with knowledge of engineering, entomology, linguistics, history, and so on) or Karl Marx (philosophy and economics, with a sophisticated knowledge of theater, since he was a drama critic), someone less earthshaking but still able to discuss string theory in the same breath as AlDub, someone with tremendous curiosity and wide experience inside and outside the campus.

That professor would handle all the classes not just in the week we are talking about but the whole term. Students would then not be experts in one discipline, but they would know who to vote for and why. They would see the problem as a whole (“holistic”), not just from one or two angles of vision.

The problems that our students have to solve after they graduate (and in some cases, even before they graduate) cannot be solved using only one discipline. They cannot decide who to vote for using only platforms or poetry or surveys. Because they are students and have to take into account academic wisdom, they cannot decide on the basis of how they feel or how impressed they are by some candidate or other, or how their parents or friends will vote. They have to decide on the basis of science (political, social, literary, mathematical, natural, and so on).

If we take something less ephemeral than elections, such as poverty or climate change, the need to use more than one discipline becomes not only necessary, but imperative.

In a public lecture that I gave at the Ateneo de Manila University last month, I talked about the three types of “multiple disciplinarity” (the generic term used by Choi and Pak) and why we have a problem with our educational system.

I said, and I will write about it in the next column, that all our students need to be multiple disciplinal, but most of our teachers right now are not ready to help them.  (To be continued)