Dialogues between Two Cultures: Objectives and Methods for Multi-disciplinary Courses
Claudia van Gerven
Preface:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have preceded
you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to
pause and tell you exactly what it is about . In fact, the discussion had already begun
long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you
all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have
caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer
him, another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the
embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally’s
assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must
depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.1
Kenneth Burke’s characterization of the history of ideas as an interminable conversation
suggests some of the challenges students face in negotiating an entrance to university life. Such a
characterization implies that students must – among other skills– listen, read, interpret, analyze,
evaluate and articulate responses to various voices within that conversation. But imagine the
student’s difficulty if the voices in that conversation were all speaking different dialects– not
necessarily mutually unintelligible languages, but variations large enough that the nature and
intent of parts of the conversation become obscured even to veteran participants, who keep
insisting that their dialects are perfectly intelligible if other participants were only right-minded
enough to understand.
Such an image, perhaps, suggests something of impetus for the Dialogues Project and its
call for curricular change. The Project suggested that students and scholars alike are increasing
living in a world in which understanding the nature of the differences between the dialects of the
sciences and the humanities is becoming increasingly imperative. In bringing together scholars
from across institutions, colleges, and disciplines, the Dialogues Project demonstrated not only
the disjunctions between various world views, methodologies, and terminologies, but also the
points of concurrence, intersections of ideas, methods and so on. If the Project demonstrated
differences in dialects, it also demonstrated the intellectual and creative advantages to pursuing
the conversation.
Outcomes of the Dialogues between Two Cultures Project
One of the clear outcomes of the Dialogues Project was the need for multi-disciplinary
dialogue not only for and between students, but for and between scholars and practitioners as
well. The first lecture and seminar suggested that disjunctions in epistemology, methodology,
terminology, etc. divide even particular disciplines so that the exchanges between scholars
become more and more problematic and call for more and more intellectual openness, tolerance,
1
Burke Kenneth. 1967. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 2nd edition. Baton Rouge;
Louisiana State University Press.
curiosity and adaptability.
On the other hand, the lecture and seminar around science and religion posed the
possibility that even disciplines whose methodologies and epistemologies seem most grounded
in empiricism may in fact share ways of knowing with modes of religious experience, artistic
creation, even athletic performance. The discussion seemed to recall Howard Gardner’s work
around multiple intelligences, suggesting that while the culture at large may define intelligence
as a linear verbal or mathematical process, there are multiple ways to render the world
intelligible which when mastered may overlap, intersect, coalesce.
The lecture and seminar concerning multi-disciplinarity and the nature of the academy
offered a number of intriguing concepts which would be most useful in both scholarly and
curricular innovations. The distinction between multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary projects
was extremely valuable as was the notion of credentialing. These issues brought into focus the
ways in which the success of any multi-disciplinary courses or scholarly collaborations will
depend upon the ways in which both students and instructors understand their status in the
community of discussants. Research suggests that students’ success in various academic
discourses depends on how they understand their backgrounds as being valued within academic
communities. In a genuinely multi-disciplinary course, therefore, the disciplinary world views or
cultures of each participant must be equally valued. All discussants– both students and faculty–
need to understand themselves as simultaneously experts and novices.
The Dialogue Project’s presentation on the interrelations between technological
innovation and artistic work also offered some valuable insights into the ways in which
technology, social sciences and humanities could intersect in the classroom. While the presenter
was unable to come to the seminar discussion, her art works utilizing technological fabrication
critiqued in powerful ways the social implications of technologies and strongly emphasized the
ways in which art can make the latent manifest. Her image of students kneeling with their
foreheads resting against her door in order to receive information from her communication
system about grades and office hours, comically, but graphically demonstrates that technologies
create power relationships between the purveyors and the users of technologies. Such enterprises
suggest that discussions or even creations of artworks might stimulate engagement between
sciences, humanities and social science practitioners by offering concrete manifestations of the
concerns of all three.
The lectures and seminars Science and Policy and Networking among Cultures, on the
other hand, provided intriguing scenarios for applying multi-disciplinary perspectives to
concrete technical and environmental case studies. That technical solutions are grounded in
social and esthetic contexts extends the focus of the idea of problem solving.
Objectives and Methods for Possible Multi-Disciplinary Courses:
The above outcomes suggest that we need to design multi-disciplinary courses which
strive to incorporate the following objectives and methods.
1.
Courses need to address in some fashion both the commonalities and differences between
technical, scientific endeavors and humanistic, and social scientific endeavors.
2.
Courses need to stress the need for dialogue between the cultures around these two sets of
endeavors.
3.
Courses need to be composed of equal numbers of Engineering and Liberal Arts students.
4.
Course materials, assignments, discussions should be designed to give equal weight to the
various disciplinary cultures involved
5.
Readings and assignments should call for skill sets from both technical and liberal arts
disciplines; i.e., applying concepts, theories, knowledge etc. to specific problems as well
as analyzing, critiquing, contextualizing, etc. concepts, theories, knowledge, etc.
6.
Courses need to be taught by instructors with expertise in different disciplines,
epistemologies, methodologies, etc. across the disciplinary divides discussed above.
7.
Instructors need collaborate in the classroom in presenting materials from their own
disciplines and those from others’, i.e. instructors need to be present and responsive to the
presentation of materials not within their areas of expertise.
8.
Instructors need to model openness, tolerance, innovation, curiosity and adaptability.
9.
Instructors should demonstrate a willingness to be both expert and novice.
Conclusion:
One thing that the Dialogues between Two Cultures Project highlighted was that the
willingness to engage in a dialogue is the primary factor in spanning the divide between
technical and scientific concerns and the social and humanistic concerns. While this may seem
fatuous, it is fundamental. Requisite to understanding one’s own world view is a willingness to
engage difference worlds. If we return to Burke’s metaphor of the history of ideas as an ongoing conversation, it is clear that a desire to participate in an exchange is essential. If we do not
wish to end up in a Babel of increasingly specialized and competing monologues, a willingness
to try to accept the limits of one’s own discipline and to understand or at least acknowledge the
legitimacy of others is necessary. Educating toward such a willingness is an endeavor we can no
longer ignore.