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Making Interdisciplinary Projects Work Well

Engelsk snakker scenario

Sonia

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41 years · female

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Samtale

What makes an interdisciplinary project substantial rather than superficial?

Hva gjør et tverrfaglig prosjekt grundig og solid, i stedet for overfladisk?

Godt svar:

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.

Et tverrfaglig prosjekt er omfattende når fagene faktisk endrer hverandres spørsmål, metoder eller tolkninger. Det er overfladisk når de bare står side om side under en tiltalende tittel. For eksempel bør et prosjekt om byhelse ikke bare legge til en medisinsk del, en planleggingsdel og en sosiologidel uten samspill. De medisinske funnene kan endre planleggingsspørsmålet, mens sosial forskning kan forklare hvorfor en teknisk god politikk mislykkes i praksis. Det er nettopp denne utvekslingen som er poenget. Omfattende tverrfaglighet skaper et problem som ikke kan forstås skikkelig ut fra bare ett fag. Hvis hvert fag kunne tas bort uten at argumentet endret seg, er prosjektet sannsynligvis bredt i formen, men svakt i den faglige utformingen og i den pedagogiske verdien for studentene.

Why is interdisciplinary work difficult to design well?

Godt svar:

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?

Godt svar:

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?

Godt svar:

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.