Basic Education,Interdisciplinary Research

1. INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AND
EDUCATION ON THE COLLEGE CAMPUS
Dr.Gurumeet C Wadhawa
Assistant Professor ,Department of Chemistry
Rayat Shikshan Santa's Veer Wajekar Asc
College,Phunde

2. THE TALK
 IDRE - What is it & Why should we want it?
 Anything worth something is worth fighting
for - Why is it So Hard?
 Examples Beyond RIT
 Examples at RIT
 Moving forward at RIT - Barriers and
Recommendations.
 Summary

3. WHY?
 “We are not students of some subject matter,
but students of problems. And problems may
cut right across the borders of any subject
matter of discipline”
– Karl Popper (“Conjectures and Refutations; The Growth of
Scientific Knowledge 1963)

4. WHY?
Does disciplinary practice
limit the nature and
scope problems we can
address?

5. WHY?
 Pentland: …most disciplines have “ a static body of
knowledge, in the sense that the base is static – you
may be able to add on to it. … the main deep
problems are in some sense fixed forever”.
 “Codification necessary for the formation of a
discipline tends to generate unnecessarily rigid
mindest in disciplineary learners”
 “To combine difference disciplines is (often) to
reformulate the central ideas of each” and by so doing
address a different kind of problem.

6. WHY?
 Grand Challenges of Engineering
 http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/ - http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/
 Solar energy economical
 Manage nitrogen cycle
 Health informatics
 Prevent nuclear terror
 Advance personalized learning
 Provide Energy from Fusion
 Provide Access to Clean Water
 Engineer better medicines
 Secure Cyberspace
 Engineer the tools of scientific discovery
 Develop carbon sequestration methods
 Restore and improve urban infrastructure
 Reverse-engineer the brain
 Enhance virtual reality

7. INTERDISCIPLINARITY
(THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WIKI…)
• Interdisciplinarity is a type of academic
collaboration in which specialists drawn
from two or more academic disciplines work
together in pursuit of common goals.
 In multidisciplinarity, researchers from two or
more disciplines work together on a common
problem, but without altering their disciplinary
approaches or developing a common conceptual
framework.
 True interdisciplinarity occurs when researchers
from two or more disciplines pool their
approaches and modify them so that they are
better suited to the problem at hand.

11. MAPS OF SCIENCE AND COLLABORATION
 http://www.idr.gatech.edu/overlay.php -
http://www.idr.gatech.edu/overlay.php
 Rafols, Porter, Leydesdorff

12. MAPS OF SCIENCE AND COLLABORATION
 http://www.idr.gatech.edu/overlay.php -
http://www.idr.gatech.edu/overlay.php

13. MAPS OF SCIENCE AND COLLABORATION
 http://www.idr.gatech.edu/overlay.php -
http://www.idr.gatech.edu/overlay.php

14. INTERDISCIPLINARITY
(THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WIKI…)
• Interdisciplinary programs arise from a conviction
that the traditional disciplines are unable or
unwilling to address an important problem.
• For example, social science disciplines such as
anthropology and sociology paid little attention to the social
analysis of technology throughout most of the twentieth
century. As a result, many social scientists with interests in
technology have joined science and technology studies
programs, which are typically staffed by scholars drawn
from numerous disciplines (including anthropology, history,
philosophy, sociology, and women's studies).

15. INTERDISCIPLINARITY
(THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WIKI…)
• Interdisciplinary programs arise from new research
developments, such as nanotechnology, which
cannot be addressed without combining the
approaches of two or more disciplines.
• Quantum information processing, which amalgamates
elements of quantum physics and computer science,
• Bioinformatics, which combines molecular biology with
computer science.
• Imaging science, amalgamates elements of engineering,
physics, mathematics, visual perception, color science,
and chemistry
• Materials Science, amgamating physics, chemistry and
engineering

16. THE VALUE OF IDR (2004) -
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO NAC
 “Interdisciplinary research (IDR) can be one
of the most productive and inspiring of
human pursuits - one that provides a format
for conversations and connections that lead
to new knowledge. As a mode of discovery
and education, it has delivered much
already and promises more - a sustainable
environment, healthier and more
prosperous lives, new dis- coveries and
technologies to inspire young minds, and a
deeper understanding of our place in space
and time.”

17. IDR DRIVERS -
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO NAC
“Interdisciplinary thinking is rapidly becoming
an integral feature of research as a result of
four powerful drivers:
 the inherent complexity of nature and
society
 the desire to explore problems and
questions that are not confined to a single
discipline,
 the need to solve societal problems,
 and the power of new technologies.”

18. THE BARRIERS TO IDRE -
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO NAC
 “Despite the apparent benefits of IDR,
researchers interested in pursuing it often
face daunting obstacles and disincentives.
Some of them take the form of personal
communication or “culture” barriers; others
are related to the tradition in academic
institu- tions of organizing research and
teaching activities by discipline-based
departments - a tradition that is commonly
mirrored in funding organizations,
professional societies, and journals. “

19. PERSONAL BARRIERS TO IDRE –
 Dimensions of a discipline
 Epistemic – way of knowing
 Social – way of working
 Thinking Across Perspectives and Disciplines, Miller and Mansialla Good Work Porject
Report Series Number 27 2004
 Bridging Bridges Across Disciplines: Organizational and Individual Qualities of Exemplary
Interdisciplinary Work
 Mansilla, Dillon, Middlebrooks, GoodWork Project, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate
School of Education

20. PERSONAL BARRIERS TO IDRE –
 Epistemic – way of knowing
 Disciplines have distinct analytic tools concepts
and methods
 Disciplines have distinct languages and
representations (terminology and notation – e.g.,
math vs music)
 Disciplines have distinct mechanisms for
demonstrating knowledge (proof, score, demo,
product, paper)
 Disciplines have distinct mechanisms for
proprietariness (authorship, patents, copywrites,
open source, etc)

21. PERSONAL BARRIERS TO IDRE –
 Social – Way of working
 Disciplines have “bodies of disciples”
 Share formative experiences
 Share common culture (cooperation,
competition, etc.)
 Set boundaries of acceptability
 Set standards of measurement

22. PERSONAL BARRIERS TO IDRE –
 “required” traits of successful IDR
 Broad Ranging Curiosity
 Open mindedness
 Risk taking
 Humility
 Willingness to work hard to learn new things
(delayed gratification)

23. TAKES TIME–
 Popkin “It takes time to truly build teams.
Not one or two years, it takes five years –
for people to truly start talking to and
understanding each other. And for the
methods to start melding together – the
measurements concerns, the statistics
concerns, and the theoretical concerns”

24. PERSONAL BARRIERS TO IDRE –
 Modes
 Collaboration
 Benefits from full depth of expertise
 Retains credibility in disciplines
 Much overcome host of collaboration issues
 Egotism, Language, Tools, Culture
 Hybridization – one person learns both
disciplines
 May be able to tackle more intractable problems towards profitable
outcomes
 The person is the translator and common tool user
 Risks superficiality and credibility loss
 Energy and time needed to develop hybrids
 Loss of depth over time

25. STEPS TO IDR COLLABORATION
 Reason through analogies
 Create compound concepts
 Build Complex and Multi-causal
Explanations
 Advance through Checks and Balances
 Bridging the explanation action gap
Evolve with time– different approaches (and disciplines)
at different stages of the problem solving

26. INDIVIDUAL SHORTCOMINGS AND RISKS
 Takes a lot of time and effort
 May not get credit in home discipline
 Long lead time to something to show
 Tough for students from interdisciplinary
fields to get jobs in academic

27. THE GENERIC BARRIERS TO IDR
• Students - eager, but untrained
• Faculty - untrained, tenure-scared, time
limited, peer-inhibited, but natural curious
• Fields - tend to be conservative - “that’s not
physics!” “that’s not economics!”
• Administration - designed to support college
& departmental structure, discipline-centric
• Structure - Office space, teaching areas,
research labs, all arranged by discipline
• Granting Agencies - designed to support
disciplines

28. THE BARRIERS TO IDR -
WIKI RETURNS
 “Due to … the barriers, interdisciplinary
research areas are strongly motivated to
become disciplines themselves. If they
succeed, they can establish their own
research funding programs and make their
own tenure and promotion decisions. In so
doing, they lower the risk of entry.
 Examples of former interdisciplinary research
areas that have become disciplines include
neuroscience, biochemistry, materials science,
and biomedical engineering.

29. IDR - NAC RECOMMENDATIONS
 Students S-1:
 Undergraduate students should seek out
interdisciplinary experiences, such as courses at
the interfaces of traditional disciplines that
address basic research problems,
interdisciplinary courses that address societal
problems, and research experiences that span
more than one traditional discipline.
 Graduate students should explore ways to
broaden their experience by gaining requisite
knowledge in one or more fields in addition to
their primary field.

30. IDR - NAC RECOMMENDATIONS
 Researchers and Faculty Members
 Researchers and faculty members desiring to work on
interdisciplinary research, education, and training
projects should immerse them-selves in the languages,
cultures, and knowledge of their collaborators in IDR.

31. IDR -
RECOMMENDATIONS FROM NAC
 Educators
 Educators should facilitate IDR by providing educational
and training opportunities for undergraduates, graduate
students, and post- doctoral scholars, such as relating
foundation courses, data gathering and analysis, and
research activities to other fields of study and to society
at large.

32. IDR -
RECOMMENDATIONS FROM NAC
 Academic Institutions
 Academic institutions should develop new and
strengthen existing policies and practices that
lower or remove barriers to interdisciplinary
research and scholarship...
 institutions should experiment with more
innovative policies and structures to facilitate
IDR, making use of lessons learned from IDR in
industrial and national laboratories.

33. IDR -
RECOMMENDATIONS FROM NAC
 Academic Institutions
 Institutions should support interdisciplinary
education and training for students, postdoctoral
scholars, researchers, and faculty by providing
such mechanisms as undergraduate research
opportunities, faculty team-teaching credit, and
IDR management training.
 Institutions should develop equitable and flexible
budgetary and cost-sharing policies that support
IDR.

34. IDR -
RECOMMENDATIONS FROM NAC
 Academic Institutional Structure
 Recruitment practices should be revised to
include recruitment across department and
college lines.
 The traditional practices and norms in hiring of
faculty members and in making tenure decisions
should be revised to take into account more fully
the values inherent in IDR activities.
 Continuing social science, humanities, and
information-science-based studies of the
complex social and intellectual processes that
make for successful IDR are needed.

35. IDR -
RECOMMENDATIONS FROM NAC
Academic Institutional Structure
 Institutions should explore alternative administrative
structures and business models that facilitate IDR
across traditional organizational structures.
 Allocations of resources from high-level
administration to inter-disciplinary units, to further
their formation and continued operation, should be
considered in addition to resource allocations of
discipline- driven departments and colleges. Such
allocations should be driven by the inherent
intellectual values of the research and by the
promise of IDR in addressing urgent societal
problems.

36. JUST A FEW EXAMPLES AT RIT
 http://www.rit.edu/kgcoe/mpd/ - http://www.rit.edu/kgcoe/mpd/(eng&business)
 http://www.rit.edu/cla/publicpolicy/ - http://www.rit.edu/cla/publicpolicy/(economics, history, political
science, philosophy, and sociology)
 http://www.rit.edu/~mkbsma/analogy/ -
http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/coon.html(math and poetry)
 http://bioinformatics.rit.edu/index.html (biology and information technology)
 http://cis.rit.edu/content/view/156/166/ (visual perception, physics, engineering, computer science,
color sci)
 http://www.rit.edu/cla/ciwg/ - http://www.rit.edu/cla/ciwg/
Experience shows that the faculty, unimpeded, will
freely develop fruitful IDRE collaborations, and find
enormous value in them personally and for the
students.

37. IN THE WILD WORLD
 http://www.haverford.edu/kinsc/HHMI/ -
http://www.haverford.edu/kinsc/HHMI/(incen
tives help)
 http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/gea/index.html
(a project oriented approach)
 http://www.evergreen.edu/ (a college
formulated around the concept)
 http://biox.stanford.edu/ (doing it up right,
infrastructure, commitment, $$s)
 http://research.haifa.ac.il/~emotions/

38. FUNDING WAY UP IN IDR
 Private/Foundations – HHMI, Keck, etc.
 Federal Government- increasing% of funds.
 NSF
 NIH etc.
Tendency to tag everything IDR – but are they succeeding
at a new way of knowledge creation?

39. FACT OR FICTION?
 Tendency to tag everything IDR – but are they
succeeding at a new way of knowledge creation?
 Tend to be organized around broad catch-all
themes (Global Climate Change)
 “….most interdisciplinary research centers have a
tendency to become a nexus of loosely connected
individuals searching for intersections, as opposed to
cohesive groups tackling well-defined problems” Rhoten

40. AT RIT - IDRE IN THE STRATEGIC PLAN
 RIT will provide curricula that are application
focused, practice-based and interdisciplinary
in nature
 There can be, by design, a flow of ideas,
opportunities, resources, facilities, equipment,
and capabilities from the Ph.D. level into
undergraduate scholarly activity. RIT Ph.D.
programs are interdisciplinary, and so
emphasize the scholarship of integration.

41. AT RIT - STRATEGIC PLAN
 Objective A1.3: Our Ph.D. programs will be few in
number, unique and interdisciplinary in focus...
 Objective A6.2: RIT liberal arts and sciences
courses will become more interdisciplinary and
international in scope.
 An opportunity in the development of Gen Ed
Requirements and Minors

42. RIT STRATEGIC PLAN
 How should RIT move forward?
 Lots of examples out there and increasing amount of
information on their successes, strengths, and
weaknesses
 Internal examples do exist… and could be studied as
well.

43. LESSONS FROM THE MEDIA LAB
 “One of the reasons it didn’t happen elsewhere
(outside Media lab) is if you look around at the
different programs that might be competitors they
are either one of two structures; one of the
structures has something which is a center that is
between departments…people from different
departments are part of it but essentially you’re
getting their marginal energies and not their core
energeries.
 Interdisciplinary Research and Education: Preliminary Perspectives from the
MIT Medial Laboratory, Dillon, 2001 Project Zero, Harvard University, Good
Work Project Report Series Number 13.

44. LESSONS FROM THE MEDIA LAB
 The second case is; some existing department
declares a part of itself to be a media center or lab, so
it’s part of computer science or arts or literature and in
that case it’s part of a department and not really
interdisciplinary. It also may get more marginal
energy than core energy.” Ken Haase Medial Lab.

 “ The flow of students between research groups as
one of the most important stimulants for their own
work”

45. LESSONS FROM THE MEDIA LAB
 “Nearly every Media Lab professor we spoke to
testified to the fact that Negroponte’s policy of
giving researchers the resources to do their work
and then leaving them alone contributed massively
to their creative success”

46. LESSONS FROM THE MEDIA LAB
 Two Clear Issues
 “”lack of bodies of experts who can judge work
that draws from specific disciplines” – lack of
critique
 struggle for distinctiveness squelches
collaboration in close collaborative environment.


47. LESSONS FROM THE BEYOND
 Which administrative structure to use is a
complicated question
 Body of literature is appearing now with good
information.
 No longer have to guess…
 See e.g., also “Interdisciplinary Research: Trend or
Transition” Diana Rhoten

48. RIT WORKING GROUP
 Barriers and Recommendations for Collaborative
Research at RIT, subcommittee of the RIT
Research Steering Committee
 Many similar issues with developing interdisciplinary
curriculum

49. RIT BARRIERS?
• This document identifies barriers to
collaborative research at RIT and makes
recommendations for overcoming those barriers.
• Barriers Subcommittee of the RIT Research
Steering Committee. Members of this
subcommittee include: John Albertini, Stefi
Baum, Doug Merrill, and James Winebrake.
• In this report, we focus mainly on barriers to
“inter-disciplinary, collaborative research.”

50. SUMMARY IDRE AT RIT
 IDRE has much to offer faculty and students
at RIT and the world at large
 Must deliver value (IDRE for a purpose)
 Interdisciplinary Education and Research
are joined at the hip
 They reinforce and motivate each other.
 Faculty and students thrive when it works
 A new level of “academic freedom and student
creativity unleashed”.
 It will happen naturally in a University
setting, if barriers are removed.

51. SUMMARY IDRE AT RIT
Some Things Are Their Own Rewards…

52. RIT SOLUTIONS
 Faculty Time
 extra effort needed for IDRE to flourish, accommodate and value.
 Information and Socialization of Faculty
 Physical intersections across colleges should go up, - faculty lounge?
 Bureaucractic credit (financial model) structure
 RIT’s financial model, metrics & $$s, need to reward IDRE and cross-college
collaboration, cutting across department and college boundaries.
 Sponsored Research, Development, etc. are Organized by College
 develop mechanisms to facilitate X-cutting opportunities
 Administration Evolution-
 To support IDRE through joint appointments across departments and college
 To support IDRE by developing metrics and rewarding faculty, department
heads, and Deans for Interdisciplinary Research and Education
 To Assure $s flow to support and encourage IDRE across department &
college lines.

53. RIT SOLUTIONS
 Faculty Standards -
 Expectation must value both discipline research and education & IDRE
where value earned.
 Promotion schema needs to evolve to support high quality IDRE.
 Just the Way We Are - We do it to ourselves…
 traditional faculty loyalty to discipline and department -
 Culture change…
 Curriculum
 curricular barriers & departmental allocation of resources impede IDRE
 double majors, team-teaching, interdisciplinary minors, faculty (and
departmental) credit for interdisciplinary team teaching all encourage
IDRE.

54. RIT SOLUTIONS
 Funding
 dedicate RIT $$s to stimulating interdisciplinarity in research and
education in key areas.
 Graduate Students
 Collaborative research across colleges requires strong graduate
programs in all colleges.
 Physical infrastructure
 need joint space for IDRE to take hold. Shoulder to Shoulder.
 Administrative Overhead
 Normalize incentives X-college (where differences for faculty
exist across colleges, barriers can be created, and frustration
grow).