Does Interdisciplinarity Exist Behind the Façade of Traditional Disciplines? A Study of Natural Resource Management Teaching

Abstract

We investigated the hypothesis that interdisciplinarity is being explicitly taught behind the façade of traditional disciplines. We interviewed 14 academics (seven geographers and seven agricultural scientists) about their teaching in the inherently interdisciplinary field of natural resource management. Our teachers were generally well informed about interdisciplinarity, believed it is important in a natural resource management degree, and participants viewed the traditional discipline-based structure as a major obstacle to collaboration, mostly because of competition between disciplines for student income. Other barriers included the strong rewards of disciplinary specialization, the difficulty of sustaining teaching teams, and other university structures, such as inflexible timetables. We suggest that if institutions with traditional discipline-based structures want to provide students with interdisciplinary opportunities, teachers need to be adequately supported in terms of workload, career rewards and pedagogy.

Keywords:

• Interdisciplinarity
• collaboration
• natural resource management

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Peat Leith for helping refine the interview questions and to Sharon Thomas and Tim Moss for comments on an earlier draft of this article.