Whittier Professors Publish Research on Interdisciplinarity

Working with students in the Whittier Scholars Program from 2013 to 2017, Professor of Philosophy Paul Kjellberg and Professor of Spanish Doreen O’Connor-Gómez—along with their colleague Professor of Philosophy Michael O’Rourke at the University of Michigan—spent four years exploring the possibility of teaching interdisciplinarity—an approach that involves combining two or more academic subjects—to undergraduate students who have not yet mastered a particular discipline. 

Their research paper, “Interdisciplinarity and the Undisciplined Student: Lessons from the Whittier Scholars Program,” was published this past summer in the peer-reviewed academic journal Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies. 

Their study focused on students who were juniors at Whittier at the time. In the class, the professors facilitated the development of what they called “interdisciplinary consciousness.” From 2013 to 2017, the group worked with a total of five cohorts. The study involved a questionnaire that was meant to draw attention to the different unconscious ways that people approach problems, which yielded their results. 

“The main outcome was to provide justification for something most of us already knew, that undergraduate students are capable of thinking interdisciplinarily,” said Kjellberg. “Most of us at Whittier already knew that but other people working in interdisciplinary studies tend to think of the mixing of disciplines as something that happens after students have acquired disciplinary expertise, not while. So it was a point worth making.”