ERIC Number: EJ1445864
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Dec
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1598-1037
EISSN: EISSN-1876-407X
Available Date: N/A
Setting off the Dominoes: A Theory of Change for Scaled Interdisciplinarity at a Sino-American Joint-Venture Liberal Arts and Sciences University in China
Asia Pacific Education Review, v25 n5 p1451-1463 2024
Despite a key feature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and a core strength of liberal arts and sciences education, interdisciplinarity is also a noisy buzzword which does not always make sense from an institutional point of view. Traditional interdisciplinary fields take it for granted like fish in the water while, somewhere else, people keep a distance with questions. "Doing" interdisciplinarity faces additional boundary challenges due to strong gravitational forces that are national, historical, and increasingly from between college and workplace. For a higher education institution whose vision for robust interdisciplinarity is rooted across these boundaries, it is not enough to set up a curriculum, hoping that once and for all the train of interdisciplinarity will roar on. In reality, it may take a higher magnitude of interdisciplinarity and constant enabling mechanisms to balance out certain gravitational forces, such as the pro-STEM and pro-exam tendencies in Chinese higher education. This study surveyed the inaugural undergraduate class of Duke Kunshan University (DKU) as well as its undergraduate faculty to propose a theory of change for scaled interdisciplinarity. The resulting theory of change elaborates on an actionable definition of interdisciplinarity using a vocabulary common to college and workplace, a mobility lens for measuring and leveraging different and especially higher magnitudes of interdisciplinarity, and a linchpin mechanism for energizing this mobility so that interdisciplinarity is more entwined with other institutional facets of teaching, learning, and research.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Interdisciplinary Approach, Undergraduate Students, College Faculty, Universities, Change Strategies, Liberal Arts, Sciences, Geographic Regions, Barriers, Partnerships in Education, International Cooperation, Student Attitudes, Teacher Attitudes
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: China; United States
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A