Why is it that academic disciplines tend to work in disciplinary silos, when working with other disciplines might enable academics to gain insights into alternative practices they might adopt or adapt within their own discipline – or that might support the co-creation of new pedagogies to better support learners to address the global grand challenges?
On Wonkhe back in August, Jonny Hall – laudably – proposed the need to step outside the comfort of our disciplinary boundaries when engaging students in experiential learning pedagogies. Employing cross-disciplinary pedagogies, he asserted, provides a means to supporting our students to “act, learn, reflect, inquire and construct new knowledge” together to prepare them as “future-ready” graduates able to address the grand challenges of the twenty-first century.
That earlier article highlighted the many structural barriers than can impede cross- or interdisciplinary experiential learning. Based on my experience as an advocate for and facilitator of experiential learning, I would also stress the need to consider the wider relational and emotional dynamics that are felt by academics through not only working with other disciplines but in the process of facilitating experiential learning.
These dynamics, I would argue, are far stronger barriers than the structural barriers and are certainly far more difficult to overcome – especially within the contemporary performative university where perceived failure is not an option.
Territories and tribes
In what was considered to be pioneering work at the turn of this century, Becher (then Becher and Trowler) highlighted the dominant power hierarchies or territories that sit within academic disciplines, and their tribal practices. These territories not only condition, and perhaps define, academics’ behaviour and values – including, for example, their proclivity to collaborative working – but also in turn shape their methods of interaction, of research, of pedagogy and so on, with some disciplines being perceived by their nature as holding dominance over others.
While more recently the reliability of this thesis has been questioned, and especially within the marketised and performative university where other forces exert perhaps stronger pressures, it is nonetheless accepted that these disciplinary forces are, among others, central in shaping academics’ identity and in determining academic discipline esteem.
Drawing upon my research within the field of identity studies, I would thus suggest that when academics step outside the sphere of their discipline, and assume new expectations and responsibilities, this risks surfacing their significant discomfort, provoking a threat to their sense of self – that is, to their identity.
When identities are threatened so the natural response is that of defence, with the fierce reassertion of their disciplinary identity, and the highlighting of its distinctiveness as efforts are made to re-establish self-esteem and self-efficacy. Therefore, rather than academics coming together collaboratively, there is a risk that they are pushed further apart.
Tensions
Numerous studies have examined the experiential learning classroom, specifically the preparation needed by academics facilitating experiential learning and of the tensions such academics face in supporting experiential learning activities.
Of these tensions, perhaps the most significant for the large majority of academics is the loss of control they experience within the experiential learning classroom. This results, for some, in heightened anxiety, a sense of incompetence, and emotional exhaustion, as they are required to follow the lead of their learners in a dynamic and unscripted way, rather than create the learning space that they themselves as an academic envisage or want.
Such loss of control too will inevitably invoke an identity threat, as one’s professional identity as educator is questioned. From this can follow an ongoing effort to reassert and sustain one’s disciplinary identity even more tightly.
The grand challenges
It cannot be questioned that cross- and inter-disciplinary approaches are vital to addressing contemporary global grand challenges. However, working effectively in a cross- or interdisciplinary way – especially while employing experiential pedagogies – potentially presents significant challenges for academics, with implications for their wellbeing and effectiveness as educators.
Constructively addressing the identity threats that academics might likely feel necessitates better understanding by institutions of academics’ perspectives on cross- and interdisciplinary working and learning, the tensions they face, and the support that they need.
Moreover, such learning context requires acceptance, by institutions, of potential failure. Addressing the structural constraints comprises only a very small part of the picture.
