Interdisciplinary curriculum reform in the changing university

Teaching in Higher Education ISSN: 1356-2517 (Print) 1470-1294 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cthe20 Interdisciplinary curriculum reform in the changing university Victoria Millar To cite this article: Victoria Millar (2016) Interdisciplinary curriculum reform in the changing university, Teaching in Higher Education, 21:4, 471-483, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2016.1155549 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1155549 Published online: 16 Mar 2016 Submit your article to this journal Article views: 264 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cthe20 Download by: [217.44.82.14] Date: 13 October 2016, At: 06:11 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION, 2016 VOL 21, NO 4, 471–483 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1155549 Interdisciplinary curriculum reform in the changing university Victoria Millar Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY In response to the current demands and trends within education, the disciplines as one of the core long-standing organizing structures within knowledge production and transmission are questioning and shifting what and how they teach Universities are increasingly offering interdisciplinary subjects and programmes as an alternative to or alongside disciplinary subjects This paper investigates the underlying themes and principles that inform curriculum debate around the value of the disciplines and interdisciplinarity in Australia when compared to the views and practices of academics A focus on the knowledge that is included in discipline-based and interdisciplinary curricula reveals interdisciplinary knowledge to be more weakly classified and framed than discipline-based knowledge This has consequences for the depth of interdisciplinary knowledge and requires the consideration of the structure and place of interdisciplinary curricula in university education Received 30 October 2015 Accepted 14 February 2016 KEYWORDS Curriculum; disciplines; interdisciplinarity; knowledge Introduction Universities are undoubtedly going through a period of reflection and reform in relation to their broad mission and the role they play as knowledge transmitters and builders of new knowledge Pressures that universities face both internally and externally have given rise to a number of conflicting questions and issues in regard to the kinds of knowledge that should be included in curriculum Universities in recent decades have seen a knowledge explosion and increasing specialization while also facing a greater focus on instrumentalism and accountability Where once curriculum closely followed a traditional disciplinebased structure, universities are increasingly looking to structure curriculum in new ways As Rizvi and Lingard discuss, ‘curriculum reform has been linked to the reconstitution of education as a central arm of national economic policy, as well as being central to the imagined community the nation wishes to construct’ (2010, 96) Whereas once university curriculum was almost entirely determined by disciplinary experts, this has changed and the influence that external stakeholders now have in directing curriculum is unprecedented Through policies and programmes and the frameworks they embrace, governments embed directions as to what should be given priority There have increasingly been calls from government and employees to have students graduating that can CONTACT Victoria Millar vmillar@unimelb.edu.au of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia © 2016 Taylor & Francis Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University 472 V MILLAR contribute positively to society, and the economy and employees are voicing their concerns about the kinds of students that universities are graduating (Case 2011) Questions about what knowledge and skills students should learn alongside how best to prepare students for the workplace, how to maintain relevance and the ability to tackle society’s big problems create an inevitable challenge for curriculum change and development In the debate about what a modern curriculum should look like, interdisciplinarity has arisen as one possible part of the solution While calls for interdisciplinarity have permeated the discourse around higher education for many decades, it is argued in this paper that in more recent times the dominant call for interdisciplinarity has at its core been instrumentalist in orientation, particularly the focus on skill building and dealing with the world’s current ‘grand challenges’ Interdisciplinary curricula are seen to meet some of the contemporary demands for knowledge and skills that equip students for addressing the most challenging problems of our time (Holmwood 2010; Moore 2011) In recent years, many previously tradition-bound universities have made radical reforms to their curriculum in many cases, shifting the balance between discipline-based and interdisciplinary components of the curriculum This paper investigates firstly the underlying themes and principles that inform curriculum debate around the value of the disciplines and interdisciplinarity with a particular focus on Australia This is then explored in light of recent calls in the literature to ‘bring knowledge back in’ (Young 2008) It is argued that discussions of interdisciplinarity both in government and institutional documents and much of the literature not directly address the kind of knowledge that is being taught in interdisciplinary curricula and instead focus on the beneficial skills that stem from interdisciplinary learning The paper provides a new perspective on disciplinary and interdisciplinary curriculum through a consideration of the knowledge that is taught in these two contexts This is done by drawing on data from two research projects that consider the perceptions and practices of academics in relation to discipline-based and interdisciplinary knowledge On the basis of this, it is concluded that current drivers for interdisciplinarity in university curricula are largely instrumental and that interdisciplinary curricula not allow access to the same depth of knowledge that is available in discipline-based courses The paper concludes with a consideration of how the issue of depth in interdisciplinary curricula might be addressed Interdisiplinarity In discussions of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, some observers have labelled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the disciplinary stage when compared to the pre-disciplinary stage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Frodeman 2014) Such discussions often take this to the logical next step in making a call for a post-disciplinary stage (Frodeman 2014), a more interdisciplinary stage There is no doubt that the disciplines in recent times form the ‘modern social order of knowledge’ (Weingart and Stehr 2000, xi) Disciplines provide a way of sedimenting, focusing on and building knowledge over time, of developing understandings of the world and ways of further researching it that extend beyond the individuals or social entities that make up the field The disciplines also play a crucial role in reducing the complexity of knowledge and providing a crucial framework TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 473 for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge (see Abbott 2001, 130–131; Rosch 1978, 29) Disciplines are also social entities in their origins and interests, and in their professional associations, journals, communications and the identities of those who work in them (Becher and Trowler 2001) It is this deeply social aspect of the disciplines, their ‘disciplinary culture’, that leads some to question the self-referential and reproductive nature and for many the perceived limitations of the disciplines (e.g Frodeman 2014) Universities are typically structured around the disciplines (Clark 1986; Weingart and Padberg 2014), and it has been argued that such governance structures can have a large amount of influence over how easy it is to move across disciplinary boundaries (Crow and Dabars 2014) For this reason, it has been suggested that through new interdisciplinary initiatives and directions that universities will be better equipped to tackle the complex issues that society is now faced with and produce students that are better placed to work in a now more complex labour market (see e.g Newell 2010; Frodeman 2014) In the past, calls for interdisciplinarity were generally more epistemic in orientation and were responses to an increasing rate of specialization in the disciplines, views that education should be more holistic and post-modern critiques of the disciplines (Klein 1990; Frodeman 2014) In more recent times however instrumental calls for interdisciplinarity have dominated Instrumental interdisciplinarity is associated with a push to solve practical problems that require the tools and theories of multiple disciplines and takes up the skill development of students and societies big problems (Klein 1990) This move towards more instrumental versions of interdisciplinarity is in line with the now well-known mode view of knowledge proposed by Gibbons et al (1994) In Gibbon et al.’s influential original work, Mode was seen as the traditional disciplinary and inward-looking mode of knowledge production, whereas Mode is associated with interdisciplinary modes of knowledge that are problem-based and end-focused Epistemic and instrumental rationales for interdisciplinarity are not necessarily mutually exclusive and many supporters of interdisciplinarity regardless of their justification see this as a new opportunity for the transformation of the higher education sector through innovative modes of learning that seeks to bridge traditional disciplinary territories (Davies, Devlin and Tight 2010; Gardner and Boix-Mansilla 1994; Gibbons et al 1994; Klein 1990; Lattuca, Voigt and Fath 2004) Interdisciplinarity in the Australian higher education context As in many countries such as the USA (Sa 2008), Germany (Weingart and Padberg 2014) and the UK (Holmwood 2010), in recent years the Australian government has repeatedly voiced that universities need to become more interdisciplinary in orientation While in many ways it may be argued that interdisciplinarity has always existed within universities, the discourse around interdisciplinarity in government documents takes a particular position on the place of disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge A recent study (Woelert and Millar 2013) found that Australian government reports and commissioned discussion papers commonly invoke the notion of a transition from mode to mode knowledge production put forward by Gibbons et al (1994) When discussing subjects such as the knowledge or innovation economy, the prevailing view expressed in these documents has been that traditional, discipline-based knowledge is largely inward-looking, ‘esoteric’, 474 V MILLAR and by its very nature unable to address the pressing problems and issues society is facing today Interdisciplinary curricula are seen as more forward looking and able to provide a solution to more instrumental concerns within higher education, such as curricula relevance and appropriate skill development for the workforce (Millar 2016; Moore 2000, 2011) The 2011 Australian Office for Learning and Teaching Good Practice Report on Curriculum Renewal (Narayan and Edwards), for example, reaffirms this view of interdisciplinarity suggesting that there is a need to emphasise the interdisciplinary ‘nature of modern knowledge’ and identifies interdisciplinarity as ‘empowering graduates for real-world work and life environments’ and as effective in providing students access to big issues in society (8) These justifications for interdisciplinarity are also seen at the institutional level Universities in Australia have restructured their curricula in a variety of ways to incorporate interdisciplinarity and university statements about curriculum and graduate outcomes are replete with the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity – in particular, talk of producing students adept at crossing disciplinary boundaries, and able to deal with the world’s big problems such as food security or social and economic inequity For example, the University of Melbourne website explains the breadth requirement of its curriculum as offering ‘the flexibility to take on the many challenges of a 21st century global work environment … ’ (2014) The University of Tasmania describes its recent introduction of common interdisciplinary subjects for undergraduate students as an opportunity for students to ‘learn from a multi-disciplinary team with a variety of experiences and knowledge … [to develop] … skills and deepen understanding to make a difference in your own life and that of others’ (2013) The focus on preparedness for the workforce and the beneficial skills of interdisciplinary curricula reflects the trend in education towards skill development Beck puts this move towards the more generic aspects of curriculum as ‘partly in response to the perceived need to functionalize education for a world in which futures are held to be increasingly unpredictable’ (2002, 89) Griffith University, a university that has long had an emphasis on interdisciplinary programmes, lists as one of its graduate attributes ‘an interdisciplinary perspective’ and goes on to discuss that ‘students need an interdisciplinary perspective on their main discipline to provide them with the broad perspective required for becoming an effective citizen and being prepared for the varied and transitional nature of working life’ In the examples presented here, it is apparent that there is an assumed link between interdisciplinary curricula and the development of skills appropriate for a twentyfirst century workforce Also in discussions of interdisciplinary curricula, a connection is often made to society’s big issues or modern problems The justification for the new University of Tasmania curriculum explains Our curriculum reflects our belief that adherence to traditional disciplinary boundaries has potential limitations insofar as understanding contemporary economic, social and political problems To address these issues we encourage multi-disciplinary study to enhance students’ capacity to draw upon other norms and models of understanding (2015) Echoing these moves towards interdisciplinarity, many universities across the Australian higher education sector have introduced courses that by design are entirely interdisciplinary, in addition to a range of single interdisciplinary subjects Examples include TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 475 Nanotechnology, Big Data, Sustainability, Cultural Studies, Ageing and Creative Industries Such courses and subjects, designed to teach students about societies complex problems, align with Frodeman (2014, 151) proposition that ‘recent changes implemented by some universities indicate a response to pressures from outside to be more responsive to the so-called “grand challenges”’ It is clear that there is much interest in interdisciplinarity and many arguments are posited for the inclusion of interdisciplinarity in education Yet in spite of this interest, there is little discussion in government and institutional documents and the literature that investigates what knowledge is taught in interdisciplinary curricula and how this compares to discipline-based curricula Instead, there is an assumption that there is a beneficial difference and rather there is a focus on the skills that stem from interdisciplinary learning One of the implications of this is that there is little understanding of what is lost or gained in a move to more interdisciplinary curricula In response to the growing move away from discipline-based knowledge and the increased emphasis on skills and vocational usefulness, recent arguments in education take a different focus on curriculum development The case for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ Young (2008) to discussions of the curriculum and for a ‘knowledge-based curriculum’ (Young and Muller 2013) put forward by sociologists of education rooted in social realism has gained traction particularly over the past decade In order to gain a fuller understanding of what interdisciplinary curricula entails and how the knowledge taught in interdisciplinary and discipline-based curricula differ, this paper presents findings from two projects that took a focus on knowledge Project background In order to provide a perspective on the kinds of knowledge that are taught in interdisciplinary curricula, this paper draws on interview data from two different projects The first project is an Australia Research Council funded project, Knowledge Building Across School and University The aim of this project was to investigate the changing form of knowledge and knowledge-building in schools and universities through a focus on teachers and academics associated with two traditional disciplines, history and physics These disciplines were selected as they are seen as two long-standing and traditionally prestigious and well-respected disciplines At the same time, together they offer different perspectives due to the different ways they are seen to organize knowledge, differences that have been theorized in a number of ways (e.g Becher and Trowler 2001; Bernstein 2000; Biglan 1973) These disciplines while having strong histories are not static, and so the project used them as a way of capturing knowledge work and how teachers and academics in these disciplines see their agendas and practices in current times Over the course of the project, 50 semi-structured interviews were undertaken with history and physics academics from a range of universities across Australia The second project examined in detail how six academics go about teaching the same topics in both discipline-based subjects and in interdisciplinary subjects The academics came from a range of disciplines – physics, history, philosophy, visual arts, economics and ecology Data were collected over two semi-structured interviews with each of the academics The first interview dealt with each academic’s broad perceptions of teaching, their discipline, interdisciplinarity and the types of students the academics were seeking to 476 V MILLAR produce within their own discipline and their interdisciplinary teaching For the second interview, academics chose a topic they taught within both a discipline-based and interdisciplinary subject and were asked to describe what was taught in each context As an example, the physicist chose to compare the teaching of ‘energy’ to first-year physics students and to first-year students studying the interdisciplinary unit An Introduction to Climate Change Curriculum documents and assessment were also analysed This study addressed specifically what knowledge is taught in interdisciplinary studies and how this compares to the knowledge that is taught in disciplinary studies and provides insight into what these two different contexts offer students and whether this constitutes a different knowledge set The interviews for both projects were transcribed in full and annotated, paying attention to what was said and interpreting meaning in dialogue with the literature Bernstein’s work on the classification and framing of knowledge, discussed below, was used to code the data Bernsteinian concepts of classification and framing The work of Basil Bernstein in the sociology of education on the classification and framing of knowledge is useful in this paper for understanding how the knowledge in interdisciplinary curricula differs from that in disciplinary curricula For Bernstein, classification refers to the boundaries between categories; it provides the structure of curriculum (1971, 1975, 2000) A strongly classified category will therefore be insulated from other categories, whereas the boundaries of a weakly classified category are not necessarily defined or recognizable ‘In the case of strong classification, each category has its unique identity, its unique voice, its own specialized rules of internal relations’ (Bernstein 2000, 7) Framing regulates how knowledge, skills and dispositions are taught and learned within particular contexts Who has control over communication, pace, sequence, form and assessment A subject that is strongly framed is one in which the teacher more clearly has control A subject that is weakly framed is less hierarchical and the roles of the students and teachers are less clearly demarcated Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing are used in this paper to describe knowledge in discipline-based and interdisciplinary curricula and provide a means to compare these two contexts Interdisciplinarity in practice Without exception the academics interviewed, in both projects, believed that there is a place for interdisciplinary work in university education and in particular want students to form a broad understanding of different disciplines In both projects, academics discussed the increasingly specialized nature of their disciplines and the complexity of the knowledge with which they are now faced and how this often requires an interdisciplinary approach to understand There was a sense that academics were keen to see students thinking about complex interdisciplinary ideas and issues and to understand how different disciplines can contribute to these, particularly amongst those academics that had been involved in interdisciplinary teaching A number talked passionately about specific TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 477 interdisciplinary topics such as climate change and their desire to see students graduate with the ability to contribute to public discussions around some of these bigger and current issues in society So academics see justification for interdisciplinary curriculum as both epistemic and also as important in providing students with an understanding of the ‘grand challenges’ The first project however raised a numbers of issues in relation to interdisciplinary curricula, particularly around its justification, structure and depth Academics were cynical about the push towards larger generalist and interdisciplinary programmes in the university curriculum that are driven by more instrumental justifications such as a focus on generic skills, employability and student appeal Unfortunately, in this day and age, we are driven more towards focusing upon the utility of what we teach I prefer not to talk about disciplines in utilitarian terms I’d much rather talk about disciplines as being very sophisticated, well established ways of viewing the world through a particular perspective, or set of perspectives Sometimes that suffers in the drive to create mass programs that have mass appeal that are focused upon vocational utilitarian outcomes and that argument struggles sometimes (Project Academic 29 Historian) The setting up of interdisciplinary majors to attract students in what is seen to be a current and trendy topic with a more identifiable employment trajectory was an example discussed by a number of physicists interviewed Physics has in recent decades at times struggled to maintain numbers and in an effort to attract students’ specialist majors such as nanotechnology have been introduced as they are seen to hold both currency and appeal for students However no one interviewed, even those who had been recruited to set up such courses, thought that a course structured in terms of a new form of interdisciplinarity or a contemporary problem such as nanotechnology was a satisfactory replacement for a straight disciplinary major These types of programmes were seen to produce a temporary upsurge of student demand, then that falls away as other things become fashionable Curricula with a greater focus on more instrumental concerns denote a weakening of the classification of knowledge boundaries as there is less insulation between educational knowledge and everyday knowledge Some studies have shown that a weakening in classification can lead to a reduction in the depth of knowledge students’ encounter through the emptying out of content and undermining of coherence within curriculum (Beck 2002; Muller 2016) This issue of depth of knowledge in interdisciplinary curricula was raised in the interviews by a number of academics Many believed that interdisciplinary subjects and degrees not give the ‘problem portable’ foundations of a more traditional physics degree so a lot of these nanotechnology courses started probably as undergraduate courses We had one here The students come in They a little bit of Physics, a little bit of Chemistry, a little bit of Biology, a little bit of, Material Science And what ultimately happens is at the end they come out and they are jack of all trades and masters of none (Project Academic 23 Physics) If you want to do, you know, a bioscience, like a biophysics type project, and there’s many important questions in biophysics But you have to be very careful about expecting or taking a student into an area like that, because then they don’t, you find that in the end they don’t have training in either Whereas the more successful interdisciplinary scientists have always come from one field, because they have a very good understanding of one field, then they can get a knowledge of the other field, and they, it’s sufficient to engage 478 V MILLAR workers in that field, and that’s when the better discoveries are made (Project Academic 12 Physics) The inclusion of multiple disciplinary perspectives within an interdisciplinary subject or major was seen as problematic as such a structure does not provide students with enough time and exposure to develop a strong understanding in one discipline let alone multiple disciplines So there was concern around the reasons for introducing interdisciplinary subjects and majors that not provide students with the depth achieved through a more detailed study within a single discipline The value of having a strong disciplinebased foundation prior to pursuing interdisciplinary work was a reoccurring theme in the interviews I think it’s really important the students are given the discipline I think a discipline is, that what we call the discourse community of historians or linguists or people in literacy studies or whatever, those discourse communities are significant and can’t be wished away by cross disciplinary thought And I’ve taught too many subjects which are cross-disciplinary to think it’s possible to actually that I think the disciplines exist because the generic rules that underpin them are real, they’re not – and they’re constructs of a lot of people’s work over generations so they’re sort of like, it doesn’t disappear overnight However, I think once a student has become good at history or good at psychology or good at sociology, they are then in a position to draw on other disciplines very easily (Project Academic History) Academics believed that students benefit most from a nuanced consideration of interdisciplinarity that builds on strong disciplinary foundations The issue of depth in interdisciplinary curricula was also a finding in the second project Through the interviews with academics and analysis of curriculum and assessment documents, it was shown that when topics are taught in interdisciplinary subjects that they are not covered to the same depth as would be taught within a discipline-based subject The content that is covered in interdisciplinary subjects may be more diverse, yet it comes at the cost of depth of disciplinary knowledge For example, the historian interviewed for the second project described the differences between teaching a history subject and her interdisciplinary subject The difference is that if you’re teaching history, a history subject to history students, you’re going into a lot more complexity of detail into the historiography into the various interpretations about and so on … So you can’t that in this sort of subject So it’s a question of simplifying what you’re doing and certainly you don’t want to call it dumbing down but you’re drilling things down into central ideas (Project Historian) And the economist interviewed discussed how when teaching the topic ‘incentives’ to his microeconomics students he would discuss the limits of this concept to a much greater extent than he would when teaching the same idea in his interdisciplinary subject The Wealth of Nations In comparing a topic that academics taught in both a disciplinebased subject and an interdisciplinary subject all of the academics interviewed for the second project discussed leaving out of their interdisciplinary teaching, the limitations of aspects of the topic Another difference in how these academics taught the same topic in the two different contexts was that in their interdisciplinary teaching they omitted particular concepts or how the topic related to other topics within their discipline The physicist, in his comparison of teaching the topic of energy to first-year physics students and his interdisciplinary climate change students, revealed that he does not explicitly teach the law of conservation TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 479 of energy to his climate change students This however was seen as a central concept in his discipline-based teaching As recommended by many in the literature (e.g Davies, Devlin and Tight 2010; Franks et al 2007; Klein and Doty 1994; Newell 1994), many interdisciplinary courses and subjects are organized around an overarching theme, topic or question This study revealed that academics only include knowledge they believe is relevant to the overarching theme or topic of their interdisciplinary subject For this reason the limits of the ideas taught and their relations to other concepts and topics are excluded As the academics have tied the knowledge taught tightly to the overarching theme of their interdisciplinary subjects, rather than abstracting the knowledge from the context, the knowledge is weakly classified The leaving out of the limitations and relationships in interdisciplinary curricula aligns with Bernstein’s idea that sustained strongly classified work is often required so that students can become familiar with the ‘specialised rules of internal relations’ (Bernstein 2000, 7) As Winch (2013) discusses, curriculum needs to provide induction into the process of limits and the relationships of a subject and ‘the procedures required to gain and to validate knowledge’ (13) Muller also discusses, ‘Knowing which concepts refer to which other concepts, and their implications, are what knowing a subject is about’ (2016, 81) This was found to be undertaken to a greater extent within discipline-based subjects and echoes the concerns raised in the first project that interdisciplinary subjects not develop a strong foundational understanding The interviews with the academics in the first project revealed that many academics believed that interdisciplinarity was best done in the later years of undergraduate or at post-graduate and research levels This then allows students to develop a stronger disciplinary understanding before moving more successfully into interdisciplinary areas Others felt that a small amount of interdisciplinary coursework at the undergraduate level was reasonable as long as it did not crowd out the ability to form a strong base of knowledge I think a first good time to introduce students with the principals of interdisciplinary work would be with the higher years of undergraduate study Because I think it could be very confusing to students Students first need, they need to understand the basics of the discipline they’re majoring in, before you can actually talk about cross-disciplinary work (Project Academic 34 History) I think that in the intellectual sphere it’s very helpful that people have an awareness of and a deep understanding of one particular disciplines way of thinking as their base And then they expand out to taste other people’s ways of thinking But I think that that is a better basis for us to proceed on than trying to create a melded product at the undergraduate level Because all you get then is mediocre physics or mediocre biology … (Project Academic Physics) This does not mean that academics were against interdisciplinary subjects such as environmental studies and the like at undergraduate – they think there is a need for students to get some exposure to a bigger field and types of questions that they might want to specialize in but they not want this to crowd out more structured foundations for deep understanding While many acknowledged that addressing big challenges such as climate change may require interdisciplinary approaches, and while there was recognition that interdisciplinary collaborations can be fruitful and rewarding, the academics interviewed were consistent in their belief that their primary contribution to these lies in their disciplinary expertise: … it’s very easy to say, you know, that the big problems are in climate change Which is true, that’s where they are, they’re in climate change and they’re in water, they’re in renewable 480 V MILLAR energies, and these are cross-disciplinary and that’s true And so it’s very easy to say, ‘We’re going to fund cross-disciplinary research,’ but none of those questions are going to be solved by people who don’t have sound knowledge in the disciplines which underpin all of the complex aspects of those areas (Project Academic 12 Physics) I wouldn’t go on making a fuss about being interdisciplinary because you can’t be, as we know, until you’ve got a discipline or two under your belt (Project Academic 14 History) So I think that there is a certain risk with cross-disciplinary approach if you end in a kind of scholarly no-man’s land and produce, well, beautiful castles of hot air without any foundational research to back it up (Project Academic 34 History) So the academics saw interdisciplinarity as important but questioned the motives for introducing it into the curriculum because they were concerned about the depth that interdisciplinary curricula could provide, particularly if introduced too early They believed that interdisciplinary work was most successful when approached from a place of disciplinary depth Unlike the discourse seen in Australian government papers and institutional discussions that often positions disciplinarity as being separate or even opposed, the academics consistently presented a more entwined and complex view of how the two relate This aligns more with some of the discussion in the literature that presents disciplinarity as inherent to interdisciplinarity (Abbott 2001; Klein 1990) One was not seen to be possible without the other, disciplinary foundations came first; this then allowed academics to make valuable interdisciplinary contributions This points to an ability to transfer understanding to other contexts once it has been formed strongly within a disciplinary setting An additional difference found in the second project between discipline-based and interdisciplinary subjects is that the interdisciplinary subjects were more constructivist It is apparent that there is a push within universities to teach interdisciplinary subjects in a manner that is more ‘innovative’ and so the academics teaching these subjects tended to take on a constructivist approach Like other studies (e.g Muller, Davies and Morais 2004) that have found that constructivist approaches can lead to more weakly classified and framed than discipline-based subjects that were found to be the case in this project as well A weakening of classification and framing was found to be the case particularly for assessment in interdisciplinary subjects that often took the form of open tasks that were understipulated The exam for the interdisciplinary subject that the historian taught, for example, asked students to write about ‘four different things that you really valued learning in this course’ In asking students what is valuable to them, there is less emphasis placed on specialized discourse and there is a weakening in the insulation between specialized content and the everyday While in this exam some guidance was provided around what things students might like to consider, the kinds of content that students could include in their answers was entirely up to them and so the framing of the task was also relatively weak For students that come from more disciplinary forms of learning and teaching, the unguided form that interdisciplinary assessment and subjects often take creates an issue Some research suggests that for novices, which is the case for those that have not undertaken interdisciplinary work before, that ‘direct, explicit, instruction is more effective and more efficient than partial guidance’ (Clark, Kirschner and Sweller 2012, 6) One of the questions that the findings in this paper raises is whether it is possible to structure interdisciplinary curricula and teaching in a way that provides a stronger foundational TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 481 knowledge and therefore reduces issues of a lack of depth It may be possible, that changes to the structure that interdisciplinary curricula tend to take offers some resolution Firstly, there is an argument to be made that including more about the relationships and limitations of the disciplinary knowledge included in interdisciplinary subjects will lead to a stronger understanding of the content being covered and provide students with a stronger ability to transfer the knowledge learnt in interdisciplinary curricula to other contexts outside of the overarching theme Secondly, tighter structure and direction particularly in assessment would be beneficial in guiding students to learn important knowledge, particularly where students have had less exposure to interdisciplinary curricula Conclusion Government and institutional documents reveal an emphasis on the need for universities to produce students with the right set of skills for the workplace and to deal with societies complex problems In these documents interdisciplinarity is positioned as providing a solution to these requirements In the projects discussed in this paper, academics were found to appreciate that interdisciplinary subjects have a place within the university curriculum, they see value in students learning the kinds of knowledge and methods that other disciplines have to offer and also understand that big issues such as climate change are best discussed through interdisciplinary subjects Yet in considering the kind of knowledge that is being taught in interdisciplinary subjects they are concerned about a lack of depth and that interdisciplinarity should therefore occur at the expense of disciplinary expertise It was felt that the most valuable contributions to interdisciplinary work are made from a strong disciplinary foundation In taking a detailed study of the kind of knowledge that is taught in interdisciplinary subjects, it can be seen that interdisciplinary subjects tend to be more weakly classified and framed than discipline-based subjects Interdisciplinary curricula tend to leave out some of the important induction into the process of limits and the relationships between concepts within a subject, whereas they would be included in a discipline-based subject There is also a tendency to teach interdisciplinary subjects in a constructivist manner that makes the curriculum more open and weakens students’ access to specialist discourse and understanding While the introduction of interdisciplinarity into university curriculum may be well justified, the more instrumental push seen in recent years has glossed over the epistemic issues of an interdisciplinary curriculum In focusing on knowledge, this paper has revealed that concerns about a loss of depth in interdisciplinary curriculum are justified Discussions of interdisciplinary curriculum need to appreciate the conceptual relations and limitations to which students are inducted in disciplinary study While it may be possible to structure interdisciplinary curriculum in such a way that it is more strongly classified and framed a greater consideration of the balance between depth and breadth in curriculum and the role that disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity play in that is needed Acknowledgements I would like to thank the researchers in the project ‘Knowledge Building in Schooling and Higher Education: Policy strategies and effects’, Professor Lyn Yates, Dr Peter Woelert and Kate O’Connor 482 V MILLAR Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author Funding I wish to acknowledge the Australian Research Council funding support for the 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