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Making Interdisciplinary Projects Work Well

Englisch Sprechszenario

Sonia

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41 years · female

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Gespräch

What makes an interdisciplinary project substantial rather than superficial?

Was macht ein interdisziplinäres Projekt wirklich substanziell und nicht nur oberflächlich?

Gute Antwort:

An interdisciplinary project is substantial when the disciplines genuinely change each other's questions, methods or interpretations. It is superficial when they merely sit side by side under an attractive title. For example, a project on urban health should not simply add a medical section, a planning section and a sociology section without interaction. The medical evidence might reshape the planning question, while social research might explain why a technically sound policy fails in practice. That exchange is the point. Substantial interdisciplinarity produces a problem that cannot be understood properly from one field alone. If each discipline could be removed without changing the argument, the project is probably broad in appearance but shallow in intellectual design and educational value for students.

Ein interdisziplinäres Projekt ist dann substanziell, wenn die beteiligten Disziplinen tatsächlich die Fragen, Methoden oder Deutungen der jeweils anderen verändern. Es bleibt oberflächlich, wenn sie nur unter einem ansprechenden Titel nebeneinanderstehen. Ein Projekt zur städtischen Gesundheit sollte zum Beispiel nicht einfach einen medizinischen Teil, einen Teil zur Stadtplanung und einen Teil zur Soziologie hinzufügen, ohne dass diese Bereiche miteinander in Austausch treten. Die medizinischen Befunde könnten die Fragestellung der Stadtplanung verändern, während die sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung erklären könnte, warum eine fachlich sinnvolle Maßnahme in der Praxis scheitert. Genau dieser Austausch ist der entscheidende Punkt. Substanzielle Interdisziplinarität führt zu einem Problem, das sich nicht aus nur einem Fach heraus angemessen verstehen lässt. Wenn man jede Disziplin entfernen könnte, ohne dass sich das Argument verändert, ist das Projekt wahrscheinlich nach außen hin breit angelegt, aber in seiner intellektuellen Konzeption und seinem Bildungswert für Studierende eher oberflächlich.

Why is interdisciplinary work difficult to design well?

Gute Antwort:

It is difficult because disciplines organise knowledge differently. A good method in one field may look weak, irrelevant or incomplete in another. For instance, an anthropologist may value close observation and lived experience, while an engineer may expect a testable model and measurable performance. If a course does not explain those differences, students may think one discipline is simply less rigorous, when it is actually answering a different kind of question. Designing the project therefore requires more than choosing an interesting theme. Teachers have to decide how much disciplinary grounding students need, where integration should occur, and how disagreement between methods will be used productively rather than hidden behind a broad theme or final presentation during assessment and feedback cycles.

How would you respond to someone who says students need depth before crossing disciplines?

Gute Antwort:

I would agree that depth matters. Students should not be encouraged to cross disciplines so early or so casually that they misunderstand both. If they have no sense of what counts as evidence in biology, economics or history, their interdisciplinary work may become confident but inaccurate. However, depth can also be developed through comparison. When students see how two fields frame the same problem differently, they may understand each field more sharply. The issue is sequencing, not a rigid ban on crossing boundaries. Students need enough grounding to participate responsibly, and then carefully designed opportunities to test that grounding against another field. Waiting for complete mastery may simply postpone the learning that interdisciplinarity can create in a well-supported course with clear boundaries.

What should universities avoid when promoting interdisciplinary projects?

Gute Antwort:

Universities should avoid using interdisciplinary language as decoration for ordinary projects. The label can sound modern and ambitious, but if the disciplines do not interact seriously, it is misleading. A course that places lectures from different departments in the same timetable is not automatically interdisciplinary. Students need to see how one field's evidence challenges another field's assumptions, and how the final answer changes because of that interaction. Otherwise, the university is selling breadth without doing the design work that breadth requires. Long term, overusing the label will make students and staff cynical. Interdisciplinarity should be reserved for work where integration is genuinely necessary to understand the problem and defend the conclusion with evidence from more than one field at once.