Sharing knowledge

Interdisciplinary projects are being encouraged

By Amy Geiszler-Jones and Julie Rausch

Students in a music class listen to a poet, an English professor, an award-winning composer and an artist talk about what influences creativity.

An engineering professor, a psychologist, an exercise physiologist and a disabilities expert are studying flexibility and range of motion in older people.

Already there are examples of WSU faculty engaging with each other in teaching and research, but a committee charged with fostering interdisciplinary activities want more.

In the classroom, students can reap the benefits of broader exposure to a topic with an interdisciplinary approach. In the research realm, collaborators in different disciplines bring new perspectives.

“The tendency too often in education is to compartmentalize education and I think everybody suffers when that happens,” says Harold Popp, who teaches the music class “Interrelated Arts.” “That’s not the way life is lived.” Popp regularly invites fellow WSU faculty from outside his discipline into his classroom.

“When you work with people who are in your field, you tend to approach problems with the same view and often come up with the same approach to solving a problem,” says Michael Rogers, assistant professor, kinesiology and sport studies. He’s one of four WSU researchers who recently received a $31,153 internal grant for the project “Range of Motion of the Elderly to Assist in Accommodation.”

“When I go over and talk to Jeff (Fernandez) in engineering, and Alex (Chaparro) in psychology or Ken (Pitetti) in health professions, they bring other approaches to solving the same problem and by combining our ideas it becomes a much better project and we are probably more likely to solve the problem than when we’re on our own. And it’s fun. I get to learn. The reason I hope people are in this field, education, is so we keep learning. What makes it enjoyable is we keep challenging ourselves and by working with other people like this we learn.”

Bringing a new approach isn’t the only plus to conducting inter-disciplinary research. Costs for equip-ment can be split and students who work on these projects get first-hand experience of working with people in different areas, says Fernandez.

Also, funding agencies are increasingly looking for inter-disciplinary projects.

“After 10 or 15 years of lip service, funders in the last five years have really begun to mean that they want collaborative research and partner-ships. And it’s starting to pay off for those who apply with that approach,” says Greg Meissen, who chairs WSU’s committee on interdisciplinary activities. The group was formed by Bobby Patton, vice president for academic affairs, in August 1997, with the charge to look at current interdisciplinary activities at WSU and ways of encouraging more.

“We found some pockets of interdisciplinary research and teaching going on, and those pockets seem very healthy and productive,” Meissen says. “We also found a robust amount of interdisciplinary work with individual faculty working with partners in the community. That really was what I think was most impressive.”

Through different activities, including an upcoming mixer and special dialogue sessions, the task force hopes to encourage more interdisciplinary work on campus.

Already there is support for such efforts. The Office of Research Administration is offering two new seed grants specifically for multidisciplinary research projects. The task force met with college deans last year and enlisted their support for interdisciplinary efforts in the classroom.

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