Centering the Program: Clusters of Inquiry

Abstract

Many colleges and universities have developed freshman general education offerings that foster student affiliation with the institution while exploring different ways of knowing among the disciplines. In addition, many schools now require seniors to apply their newly acquired expertise to community problems. Fewer institutions, however, attempt to provide an integrated course sequence spanning the freshman and senior years, a period when students experience the tension between two seemingly conflicting demands: continuing to develop general education skills while mastering the essentials of a major. Our practice and experience here has been complicated and challenged by the interdisciplinary courses that thread through these middle years. Learning to resist simple definitions and delineations, University Studies faculty continue to grapple with the intersections and the overlays among the traditional disciplines.

A central aspect of the general education reform at Portland State University is the commitment to interdisciplinarity throughout a student’s course of study. In the sophomore and junior/senior years, this emphasis takes the form of clusters of thematically linked courses drawn from a number of disciplines. In their sophomore year, students select 3 Sophomore Inquiry courses, each of which introduces 1 of the thematic clusters;¹ these courses include small mentored group sessions similar to those in Freshman Inquiry. Building upon freshman year foundations, Sophomore Inquiry courses further the development of critical inquiry and communication, as well as feature a more direct focus on the goals of appreciating the human experience and ethical issues and social responsibility. In their junior and senior years, students follow up by taking 3 additional courses in 1 of these clusters. At every step of the way, the central rationale is interdisciplinarity.

Commonalities and conflicts among disciplinary approaches to knowledge often remain obscure to students. The purpose of fashioning thematic interdisciplinary clusters is to promote the recognition of relationships that are too often hidden or unremarked. Linkage of what seem to be disparate courses enables what Giroux (1992) calls border crossing, the process of “challenging existing boundaries of knowledge and creating new ones” (p. 29), which creates a situation in which “students cross over into realms of meaning, maps of knowledge, social relations, and values that are increasingly being negotiated and rewritten as the codes and regulations that organize them become destabilized and reshaped” (p. 30). Interdisciplinary border crossing points to the need for “conditions that allow students to write, speak, and listen in a language in which meaning becomes multiaccentual and dispersed and resists permanent closure” (p. 29). It is our intention that Sophomore Inquiry courses and their clusters serve as tentative answers to such calls for open, critical, and cross-border intellectual enterprise.

Nearly all Sophomore Inquiry courses have been newly conceived over the past 3 years, and a few are substantially modified versions of courses that once served other introductory purposes. At present there are about 30 different departments and units contributing to Sophomore Inquiry and/or their associated interdisciplinary clusters. More than 50 faculty have taught Sophomore Inquiry courses while as many as 200 faculty participate at the cluster level. Clusters are markedly interdisciplinary, comprised (on average) of courses from 6 departments. At present there are 26 clusters, averaging 17 courses each (see Table 1). While most of the Sophomore Inquiry courses are new, the majority of other courses within clusters were already in existence. With the limited resources available, it was impossible to create a host of wholly new upper-division courses. But what is new for these courses is their interdisciplinary realignment. Thus, in the American Studies cluster, an anthropology course on Native Americans sits alongside a Black Studies course on Oregon African American History, an economics course on Family Values and American Economic Decline, and an English course on American Sentimentalism; in the Asian Studies cluster, an art history course—Chinese and Korean Buddhist Art—is joined by a geography course on the Pacific Rim, a history course on Modern Japan, and a political science course on the International Politics of Asia. Faculty who teach these courses have been encouraged to collaborate on modifying their content and pedagogies in ways that more solidly complement the Sophomore Inquiry and Freshman Inquiry courses that precede them. This has not been easy. Many of the cluster courses have served—and continue to serve—goals other than those of general education, in particular those of disciplinary majors. Moving toward greater intellectual and pedagogical coherence within clusters remains a focus of continued development.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate the nature of interdisciplinary clusters is to look at specific examples. I helped to conceive and develop the Science in the Liberal Arts and Sciences-Humanities clusters (along with my colleagues William Becker and Lawrence Wheeler) and thus I can speak about them with greatest assurance. In our successful curriculum development proposals to the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for Humanities, we argued that the natural and physical sciences could be more effectively engaged by students who are not science majors if we situated scientific practice in broader, interdisciplinary contexts. Using genetics as a particular example, we (Flower, Ramette, and Becker, 1997, pp. 203–4) claimed that,

[w]hile we might insist that geneticists and molecular biologists alone have the expertise relevant to someone developing a genetic literacy, the importance of additional vantage points would not be difficult to defend. Philosophers of science raise epistemological questions about genetic knowledge, while sociologists frame questions about the social structure of the genetics research community, and historians look to the past to understand the origins of modern genetics or the nature of the eugenics movement in the United States. Anthropologists chronicle the culture of a geneticist’s laboratory and its arcane practices as they might the culture of a distant people, while rhetoricians seek to delineate the forces of persuasion in genetic discourse, and ethicists ponder the many moral issues that arise as new genetic information enters into biomedical practice and individual reproductive decision-making. These narrative lines taken together constitute the complex topography of contemporary genetics. In our view, to be “literate” is to have traveled rich interdisciplinary science terrains of this sort, those composed not only of the natural sciences but of aspects of the social sciences and humanities as well.

This view characterizes both the Science in the Liberal Arts and the Sciences-Humanities clusters. Our notions of critical scientific literacy have encouraged us to engage in a fundamental revision of the sorts of scientific inquiry asked of students, including a change in the types of projects we put in place, the textual materials we assemble and students seek out, the kinds of writing strategies we utilize, and the reading styles we encourage. This is a contextual view of science that is increasingly well understood by our social science and humanities colleagues. Hence, we call upon them to help us explore what natural scientists do as they go about the forging of scientific claims that consist of contestable linkages among the “made things” of science—skills, social relations, machines, instruments, facts, and theories. The cross-border collaborations among University Studies colleagues allow faculty and students to see more clearly how it is that scientists “do society” as they go about “doing science,” effecting significant reconfigurations of the social, political, economic, historical, and moral terrain through their gradual constitution of claims, phenomena, and “things” (Latour, 1987).

As the Sophomore Inquiry “gateway” course to the Science in Liberal Arts cluster, Natural Science Inquiry sets the example for the courses that follow it. Students work on increasingly difficult projects, from analysis of a fairly complex data set (Portland weather data or Forest Service timber data in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets) to a major project of 4 or 5 weeks’ duration. For the latter, we seek student projects that promise a challenging, open-ended inquiry, as well as a product that will reflect the practical closure of that inquiry. We also strive for products that can be “passed on” to students in subsequent courses and to community project “partners,” a process that contributes to the foundation of a student’s later work in a senior capstone course. For example, several successive classes of Natural Science Inquiry students have carried out a “Data Analysis of Bird Population Dynamics and Their Relation to Habitat Types, Seasonal Change, and Restoration/Enhancement Projects at Jackson Bottom Wetlands Preserve.” The students engaged in a foundational study of a rich, 4-year collection of observations on the many species of birds that use the Jackson Bottom Wetlands Preserve west of Portland. The task was to define and enter the raw field data into a Microsoft Excel database and then begin a process of analyzing that data to highlight the ways it could be made to illustrate the dynamic changes in bird use of the preserve as a function of such variables as season, different vegetation in the preserve, and efforts at wetlands restoration and enhancement. The sorts of questions the students originated and explored included the following: What do we mean by “bird population dynamics”? What yearly patterns of migratory bird populations are in evidence? What sorts of things influence what birds use the preserve and when? How do particular bird species distribute themselves among sites within the wetlands? What are good ways to “represent” the data that have been gathered? What sorts of graphic displays would allow a member of the public to “see” the dynamic aspect of bird use of the preserve? While traditional science education in its standard lecture and laboratory forms seems to transmit information reasonably effectively, it provides little or no room for the exploratory, expressive, practical activity that is science-in-the-making— science in the exciting, unfinished, open state that characterizes this wetlands project and the similar opportunities for inquiry in other courses in the Science in the Liberal Arts cluster.

We created the Sciences-Humanities cluster as a framework within which to reexamine the real (and imagined) divides said to separate “the two cultures.” While it is true that disciplinary differences exist between biology and history or between physics and law, these gulfs are comprehensible, as the work of a growing number of philosophers of science, ethicists, historians, ethnographers, rhetoricians, and others has made increasingly clear. Joseph Rouse, a philosopher of science, has recently argued that we should understand scientific practice more broadly, seeing it as including the configuration of the world within which one’s scientific activities are significant. To this we can add the activities of humanities practitioners. When scientists and practitioners of the humanities commit their work to paper, what sorts of broad questions are at stake and how are we to address them with students in ways that enable Giroux’s border crossing? As Rouse (1996, p. 247) puts it, “What do these writings and sayings do? To whom and about whom are they expressed? In what ways do they allow for and acknowledge, or foreclose and not hear, the responses of those to, about, or past whom they speak? Above all, to whom are they accountable?” Making explicit for students the situated nature of interesting scientific and humanities questions allows students to “address what is at issue in settling a truth claim, how that issue comes to be seen as intelligible and important, and what is at stake in its settlement and for whom” (Rouse, 1996, p. 116). Questions such as these ought to be included in a “course package,” the essence of which would be “doing science as science is done.” And it would be equally legitimate to devote similar resources to “doing humanities as humanities are done.”

The Sciences-Humanities Sophomore Inquiry course is Framing the Two Cultures. We have found that students come into the course with a reasonable understanding of what characterizes the natural and physical sciences, even if some of what they understand is caricature. However, students have nearly no understanding of what areas of study constitute the humanities, let alone any sense of what disciplinary tools and methods are utilized by those who practice in the humanities. Thus, a primary goal of Framing the Two Cultures is an elaboration of humanities practice, particularly how it is similar to and distinct from work in the natural sciences. Students explore the notion of the natural sciences and the humanities as cultural practices, seeing those practices through the lens of disciplinary texts: scholarly articles, reviews, historical narratives, and autobiographies. Standard textbook accounts are utilized as a point of departure; they set up as a contrast the representations of “science- and humanities-made” versus “science- and humanities-in-the-making.” In this fashion, students are introduced to a range of intellectual issues that are addressed in a variety of newly created or radically modified courses that constitute the remainder of the cluster: THEATRON: The Place of Observation; History of Science and Religion; Theater and Science: Nineteenth-Century European Theater; Science: Power-Knowledge; History and Memory: The Entwinement of Past and Present; Ethics and Science; Visual Practices in the Arts and Sciences; Experimentation; Biopolitics; Between the Two Cultures; Science in Society: The Social Perspective.

Even though significant tasks confront us as we seek to establish greater thematic coherence among cluster courses, it is clear that we have managed to engage a significant portion of the faculty in an exciting interdisciplinary enterprise. Interesting disciplinary alliances have promoted the possibility of cross-border inquiry about provocative questions. What is perhaps most promising is the creation of an interdisciplinary space that shifts disciplinary structures and thereby provokes anew the question of how ideas fit together.

Table 1.

The Interdisciplinary Clusters at Portland State University

• African Studies • American Studies • Archaeology • Asian Studies • Classic Greek Civilization • Community Studies • Environmental Sustainability • European Studies • Family Studies • Freedom, Privacy and Technology • Global Environmental Change • Healthy People/Healthy Places • Knowledge, Rationality and Understanding

• Latin American Studies • Leadership for Change • Medieval Studies • Mideast Studies • Morality • Nineteenth Century • Popular Culture • Professions in Society • Renaissance Studies • Sciences-Humanities • Science in the Liberal Arts • Understanding the Arts • Women's Studies