Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching Among College and University Faculty (review)

Lisa R. Lattuca (2001). Creating interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary research and teaching among college and university faculty. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. 312 pages. Cloth $49.95. Paperback $24.95.

A hallmark of higher education in the United States is an ongoing call to make postsecondary education relevant, to make connections between life and academe, work and school, and different courses of study. While Dewian efforts to individualize instruction solidified the construction of academic disciplines that began in the nineteenth century, proponents of general education efforts attempt to make a cohesive whole from the curricular and research divisions. Lisa Lattuca surveys this history in the opening pages of Creating Interdisciplinarity.

Lattuca explores, in practice and in theory, how postsecondary faculty devise such links and how they create connections across and from disciplinary differences in their research and teaching. Through interviews with thirty-eight liberal arts faculty members, Lattuca attempts to define the concept of interdisciplinarity, drawing heavily from its relatively small body of existing research and theory. To do so, she relies upon feminist, poststructuralist, and postmodern epistemologies.

While Lattuca's delineations of the concept are fairly clear in chapter one, chapter two, in which Lattuca outlines how the discipline structures of academe create our notions of discourse, performance, identity, and power, were less clear. I wondered how the concepts and definitions of academic disciplines and epistemologies relate to the questions she attempts to explore. She writes, "If faculty cannot be expected to agree about what is disciplinary, neither can they be expected to agree about what is interdisciplinary" (p. 74). True enough, but as a reader I expect some aid in understanding how the previous research helps to shape (or not) the evidence and conclusions to come.

The data from the faculty provided me with stronger footing for this intellectual journey. The selections from narratives - all from senior faculty who worked within programs or courses that cross disciplines—offer evocative descriptions of faculty who attempt to work outside of the box. One theme throughout the narratives concerns making connections and establishing relevance to faculty and students outside of their disciplinary homes. Their efforts occasionally imperiled the faculty's standing with their disciplines and primary academic departments.

Lattuca arranges snippets of conversation thematically, drawing statements from thirty-eight interviews, presented over 210 pages. The quotes do explain the principles of the disciplines, but their context is missing. What are the lives and experiences of these faculty beyond (or across) their quotes? I wondered how the pieces fit together and how or if the specifics of discipline, location, and experience help the respondent make sense of his/her faculty life. Lattuca's decision not to provide names—not even pseudonyms—to her respondents left me trying to remember who was narrator C and who was C1. Without a clear understanding of the individual lives, each obviously so particular, that inform Lattuca's work, I felt as unattached to the ideas and typological theory she proffers as I was to the disembodied voices I was reading.

Lattuca's typology of disciplinarity draws heavily from previous interdisciplinary theorists' work, although she renames the types based upon her understanding of the respondents' experiences. The four types she identifies are Informed Disciplinarity (in which one discipline informs teaching and/or research in another discipline), Synthetic Interdisciplinarity (which links disciplines through specific questions or topics), Transdisciplinarity (an overarching synthesis that crosses disciplines), and Conceptual Interdisciplinarity (which has no compelling disciplinary basis). At the core of the typology is a non-disciplinary epistemology informing examination and explanation of knowledge.

How does this taxonomy change our ability to pose questions outside of the black boxes of discipline? "We must look to the point of origin [of interdisciplinary questions] to understand disciplinarity," Lattuca writes (p. 113), and "not wait until the end of a research or teaching project to determine its disciplinary or interdisciplinary nature" (p. 118). But...