Education: Between Two Cultures

I have just finished working my way through David Mazella's book on The Making of Modern Cynicism, which has helped fill in some of the gaps that existed for me in the earlier portions of our conversations (thanks!) and also, I think, offers something of a way forward from where we are now.

As I follow the argument (and David will of course correct this if it's off) tracing the prehistory of cynicism can teach us quite a bit about its role in modern morals and politics. For starters, the ancient Cynics insisted on the philosopher's public life as "the truest expression of the consequences" of his philosophy, the place where his "doctrines could be examined by the public for their truth or fraudulence."

This description seems to me similar to Serendip's contemporary role in encouraging public conversation among as large and diverse a group of thinkers and writers as it can gather (see Serendip's Evolving Web Principles & Guidelines for Publishing Thoughts on Serendip ) -- with the important caveat that the goal here is less "correction" or "truth-seeking" than the "adventure" of creating "new appreciations."

Where the two projects--the work of the ancient Cynics and of contemporary Serendipians--seem to me most clearly to intersect is in their shared refusal to uphold what David calls the "untenable distinction between political action and political language":

"these attacks betray their impatience with the vagaries of free discussion, which they figure as an empty delaying tactic designed to forestall genuine action or change....Consequently, certain kinds of doubts may not be admitted into political discussion, or certain kinds of discussion may not even taken place, because they hinder 'our' ability to act decisively."

Taking the time to think --as the reflective Cynics once did, as the thoughtful Serendipians now do...there both humanists and scientists find common ground?

If so, then: on to the next question--

Alice suggests that the conventional distinction between the objects of science and those of humanities--between "first-hand observation" and "culturally embedded" phenomena--is blurry: since "observation is culturally situated," we can't disentangle "naturally observable phenomena...from our stories of them."

This seems to me a great place to pick up on the proposal that scientists and humanists have something to learn from one another regarding our teaching experiences. Scientists might profit from recognizing their social situatedness, the embeddedness of their observations in cultural forms. What else might humanists have to learn from scientists?

Thanks, Anne, for giving the book a read. I hope you found it useful in some way.

As I was writing it, my unconscious metaphor for the Ancient Cynics was indeed the blogosphere, especially in its tactical incivilities and willingness to challenge local understandings and moralities. Part of this derived from the practice of Cynic preaching, which was conducted in the open by the Cynic philosopher, who exposed himself (in every sense of the word) to the vagaries of homelessness and exile, and the derision of crowds, to live an "other" life, a truly philosophical (meaning anti-conventional) life.

Hence, the stories of Diogenes (written by others, since he was too busy living to record his own life) became an important counter-history to the official philosophical histories of Plato etc., because it demanded action, emulation, story-telling and a harmonization of word and deed, rather than philosophical doctrine, or a merely verbal philosophy. And so Diogenes gets progressively written out of the philosophical histories between the era of Bayle and Hegel. But that's another story, for another argument.

When it comes to the objects of our analysis, I agree that the distinction between first-hand observation and culturally embedded phenomena blurs when we consider the cultural conditioning of our acts of observation. So no argument about that. (But how, exactly, does one "observe" one's social conditioning at first-hand, except by retrospection, observation of others, and awareness of their historical conditioning?)

But I think the "two cultures" typically divide about the existence of such conditioning and how this kind of awareness should be incorporated back into one's research-process. Scientists, if we look at the Sokal affair and its reception by the press and the scientific establishment, were (for the most part) thrilled at Sokal's supposed humiliation of the "relativists" and "postmoderns." (I saw PG's response, but this to me still seemed a minority voice) And while the humanists weren't thrilled at Social Text's editorial sloppiness, I haven't seen any retreat from the notion of cultural (meaning historical, ideological, social) conditioning in their own and others' research.

I think that the recent public debates about environmental science, creationism and intelligent design in the public schools, and the current regime's politicization of both science and religion has alerted not just humanists but also scientists to the need to address and persuade its publics, to gain support against these kinds of incursions.

This means that scientists will need to drop their reliance upon their supposed authority as expert representatives of an apolitical knowledge, and the humanities need to address wider publics and rethink their own forms of mandarin insiderese. In a word, both cultures may need to rethink their attitudes toward the public, and how they address it in a media environment that no longer takes their structures of authority for granted. But both of these gestures constitute a rethinking of the denial of rhetoric that created the two culture divide in the first place. For a nice take on this, see Bruce Robbins' piece on the Rhetoric of Rhetoric, published, of course, in Social Text:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/466242

[sorry Paul, about the paste-ins]

So here's my thousand dollar question: to what extent does Robbins's (and others') proposed revisiting of rhetoric dissolve the two cultures divide?

Okay so now this is REALLY getting interesting....
...and I think actually "getting some place"?
(at least it feels like it's getting me someplace new....)

I didn't know Robbins' Social Text piece on "Interdisciplinarity in Public"
before, but having just read it now, I found it making a solid contribution, on three different counts, to our conversation here about education "between two cultures." The first has to do with using the concept of "rhetoric" to articulate a structure we can use to speak "from" a discipline "to" a larger public.

* Robbins argues that historically, entering into a discipline has meant adopting "the undemocratic exclusiveness" of "disciplinary specialization," and so entering into exile from the public sphere.

* He then suggests that we might re-construct a public sphere within the private domain of scholarship "by building a bridge between fields, one that "names a common discourse" that will "speak the language of its hearers."

I actually think that's how Serendip works (when it works best) to facilitate open-ended conversation: declining an authoritative posture and using widely accessible language in order to promote on-going (rather than trying to end) discussion.

...Which brings me to relevant-point-#2: Robbins' observation that "'quality' or value has always been a criterion of literature": The rhetoric common to all the disciplines of the humanities, he argues, is the rhetoric of praise and blame, which gives rise to "awkward," "absurd," "untenable" oppositions (like Bathes' "writerly" vs."readerly" texts, or Bakhtin's contrast between "monological" poetry and "dialogical" prose). Robbins goes so far as to claim that this "urge to generate differential value" appears "for the moment to be a disciplinary necessity"--which suggests to me that building interdisciplinary bridges might be a very effective way of challenging the necessity of such judgments, by moving the conversation to a different "inbetween" place where judgment (and the stopping of conversation that entails) isn't primary--or even possible.

The third and-also-related point may be a delight mostly to me (and mayhaps to my co-authors of "Metaphor and Metonymy, Synecdoche and Surprise"): it's Robbins' evocation of a rhetorical framework of "four tropes--metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony" as defining the "deep structure of the historical imagination." Compare our schematic of the intellectual exchange between two individuals in a cross-disciplinary conversation, each traversing their own metaphoric and metonymic levels,

which is, in turn, a re-working of the semiotic square
first designed by Algirdas Greimas:

What I notice in this sequence of revisions is Jameson's suggestion that "Not S2, the negation of the negation...is always the most critical position," "the one that remains open or empty for the longest time"--and the absence of irony (on both counts) in our own scheme. By keeping the conversation open, keeping the ideas in play, we never arrive @ the space of absolute contradiction--and stalemate.

Which may return us to both of what Robbins calls the "rival" definitions of rhetoric: as a "perpetually destabilizing figuration" and as "practical, public speech...which links its indeterminacy not to language...but to the contingencies of action."

Anybody else following this....or have I gone "too" far?

As per Paul's suggestion, I'm going to follow up on one of the points Alice and I discussed, which I began to wonder about as soon as I saw it in print:

Students need to feel that they are grasping one thing before they can grasp multiple things. This is why storytelling is so important, because it sets up hierarchies and priorities that are easily intelligible to even the beginning student.

This to me is intuitively true, as I think about my own teaching experience.  The beginning student is like the stranger who is new to an area and wants to know how to get to the highway.  Should you give this person a range of options and possibilities, or the single easiest or most direct route?

My gut feeling is that good storytelling exhibits the pedagogical effectiveness and memorability it does because it is hierarchical, because it lands within what Paul was calling the range of medium-range inferences, because it anticipates and responds to students' demands for answers to the essential questions (what happened? who did it? why did it happen? where did it take place? etc.)

So I know this technique works, and why it works, in terms of accommodation of the message to the audience. 

But (and forgive me if this seems obvious) what I don't see is how this kind of storytelling is inherently unhierarchical or pluralistic, which is a major theme characterizing much of the posting on this site.  I don't mind the stratified nature of this kind of teaching, but it seems that others here do.  So how does this circle get squared? Are hierarchized stories simply the precondition for independent inquiry?

In other words, storytelling is how we as teachers translate the materials and practices of a discipline into a form whereby the beginner can take them up for herself for her own independent inquiry, but it doesn't constitute the actual practices of the discipline, since practitioners don't need such frameworks.  But I think this emphasis on the mediation of storytelling takes us further away from actual disciplinary practices, the conversations that take place among experts.  Am I correct?

DM

"storytelling is how we as teachers translate the materials and practices of a discipline into a form whereby the beginner can take them up for herself"

Interesting/highly relevant here that I had a similar conversation with a colleague in the sciences who also thought of storytelling as "an accomodation of the message to the audience." And its for that reason that I make a point of talking about "story telling" as opposed to "storytelling" (see Science as Storytelling or Story Telling?).

Its an ad hoc and idiosyncratic use of words but a distinction that I think is important. By "storytelling" I understand, as I think most people do, the practice of taking something that may or may not be itself engaging to an audience by dressing it up with connections, metaphors, and perhaps a narrative structure intended to make it more entertaining/amusing/accessible. As an educational practice this can sometimes work, but it has problems (such as the misleading messages inherent in "anthropomorphizing"). And it certainly is not "unhierarchical or pluralistic," which means it doesn't, for me, advance the cause of helping students become better inquirers themselves.

"Story telling," as I use it, means something quite different, something more akin to "The truth about stories is that that's all we are" (Thomas Young, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative). Stories are the way we all, whether academics or not, summarize observations in order to make sense of the world. They may be anthropomorphic or not, they may be cast in narrative form or not, but they have important features in common regardless. They are always context dependent, ie they reflect a restricted set of observations and so have an "authorial perspective." And they are, for the same reasons, always revisable, subject to change given new observations.

My point, of course, is that I don't see the products of disciplines as something separate from stories, something that needs to be dressed us by "story telling" to make it more palatable. The products of science are themselves stories, both context dependent and revisable. So too, in my terms, are, of course, the products of inquiries into 18th century literature, of economics, of political science, of philosophy, and so on. "Story telling" in the classroom is not, for me, replacing "the actual practices of the discipline" but is instead acknowledging/revealing the deepest part of those practices - the part that is most significant , useful, and engaging to students irrespective of whether they do or do not want to become practitioners of the particular discipline being taught. Finding out that its all "story" and learning something about the distinctive perspectives and observations represented by particular stories serves what seems to me my overriding obligation as an educator: to help students become more sophisticated inquirers.

Perhaps that sets a context for some further discussion, in at least two directions? One has to do with "disciplinary practices" and the degree of obligation we do (or do not) feel to prepare students to participate in the community of discourse we were outselves trained in and may continue to engage with. Should we, as educators, feel/act out of such an obligation? Or are we as educators (and perhaps as inquirers) better off working in a broader discourse community?

The second, related direction which I imagine would generate some useful further conversation has to do with how one generates/facilitates "broader discourse communities." My sense is that they must necessarily be "unhierarchical or pluralistic", and so the educational problem boils down to the question of how to position expertise (disciplinary or otherwise) in a pluralistic, non-hierarchical exchange. Part of the solution of that problem, I think, is not to translate expertise into stories but rather to acknowledge that it is already a story. The remaining problems have to do with how to tell disciplinary stories (or stories based on any sort of expertise) in a way that makes them accessible/useful/interesting to people in the discourse community who haven't been acculturated to a common story telling style (that's where the issues of "medium-range inferences" and whether "students need to feel they are grasping one things before they can grasp multiple things" becomes relevant). My sense is that learning to tell stories for a broader community would prove not only to make us better educators but probably better inquirers as well (even within our own disciplines).

Some further thoughts re

• what humanists might learn from scientists
• past and future: what two cultures might learn from each other

Suggestions from the sciences for the humanities

• Distinguish more deliberately/clearly between what are, at any given time, observations as opposed to interpretations.
• Recognize the uses of rational/analytic processes as well their limitations.
• Pay more attention to time and space scales beyond the typically human (individual, cultural, historical).
• Pay more attention to phenomena that are not creations of human beings but are of significance in their own right as well as the necessary underpinnings of all human creations.
• Become more concerned with the generative capabilities of individual human beings as opposed to social/cultural constructs and products.
• Develop more interactive modes of product creation and presentation.

Suggestions from the humanities for the sciences

• Become more clear about the reciprocal dependence of observations and interpretations.
• Recognize the limitations of rational/analytic processes as well their uses.
• Pay more attention to human time and space scales (individual, cultural, historical).
• Pay more attention to phenomena that are creations of human beings.
• Become more concerned with the generative capabilities of individual human beings as opposed to social/cultural constructs and products.
• Develop more esthetically appealing modes of product creation and presentation.

Hi Paul,

Your suggestions here make a lot of sense to me, though I'm beginning to think that there's more to the observations/interpretations distinction that needs to be unpacked: for example, could it be a disciplinary split wherein the sciences rely much more heavily on observation, and the humanities on interpretation for their respective forms of inquiry, though both dimensions are present to some extent in both?

 I also suspect that some of the newer, more interdisciplinary fields like geography do take in some of the time-scales you're talking about here.  In history, particularly, Annales-style reflections certain parts of the globe, like the Mediterranean or Atlantic "worlds," might partake of this spirit.

So perhaps some of this is happening already, at least at an academic level.

The other aspect of this is about what remains to be done: and here I'd point the discussion back to Robbins's point about the constitutive incompleteness of the public addressed by each of the disciplines. 

Part of the issue is the fantasy of self-sufficiency fostered by each disciplinary vocabulary for what it does, its assumption that it can, all by itself, adequately represent the world.  (this is the sticking point for any strong notion of interdisciplinarity: each discipline represents a strong claim for its own perspective, so what do they give up when they interact?)  So how do scientists, for example, address a public that is only vaguely aware of the difference between evolutionary thought and creationism?  One potential answer is that the "public" consists not only of the non-scientist part of the population, but all the other disciplines and their perspectives on evolution, for example.  What do you make of such a claim?

DM

Hi Anne,

I suppose that in my view there are many, many versions of the "free-will/determinism" binary, which take the forms of historical, scientific, theological, etc. impasses, and that my training has conditioned me to think of these versions as incommensurable with one another.   

Your question about Turner, though, is interesting, because his career seems to unite two qualities, sublimity and repetition, that are not usually associated with one another, yet seem to have some independent relation to the determinism/free-will binary.  In this respect, there seems to be some kind of Freudian "compulsion" going on that repeatedly brings him to the same kinds of awesome scenes.  (And I'd treat psychoanalysis as part of that modernist matrix of scientific/humanistic determinism that included your fictional "Turing" and "Godel")

I have to say that I don't find much "freedom" in the semiabstractions of Turner's painting, because I don't see him as breaking away from conventions so much as submitting himself to a certain kind of experience and recording the results with obsessive care.  Something was let loose in those paintings, to be sure, but it was not Turner.  So perhaps we should talk about a constitutive tension between freedom and compulsion in his art.

I also wonder if we need to set aside the special case of the artist, and restore the social or collective dimension to this discussion of freedom and compulsion?  Frankly, what arrested me in the Warner essay was not the cheery discussion of an advancing brain science, but this near-parable about how distinct psychological states can be "produced" by a truly crappy situation:

I learned that you can make a mouse “depressed” by dunking it repeatedly in cold water, by giving it electrical shocks over and over again, by subjecting it to “chronic forced swimming,” or making it experience “social defeat,” by putting a mean mouse in its cage. The latter method is the best way to test antidepressants, because after such a negative social experience it takes a mouse three weeks of drug therapy to recover, an interval that neatly parallels the amount of time antidepressants take to reach their optimal effectiveness in humans.

[Am I the only one who feels that this description makes the experiments sound like an Abu Ghraib-like situation in miniature?]

What this "story" suggests to me, perhaps against the grain of Warner's conscious intentions, perhaps not, is that when we look for the causation for "depression," for example, the place to look may not be "neurons, dendrites, action potentials, the localization of function, visual perception and transcranial magnetic stimulation," but the fact that the clinical subject is under another's power, unable to resist what is being done.  What does brain science add to such an observation?

DM

Several interesting tendrils/directions here, David--

the one that intrigues me/has me puzzling the most is your using Turner's repetitive painting of sublimity as a test case for your title query: is compulsion a form of freedom or its opposite?

Several years ago, Serendip sponsored quite a lively series of dialogues under the rubric of "Writing Descartes," which played in multiple different registers with the notion that freedom involves choice ("I am, and I can think, therefore I can change who I am"). Compulsion, by that light, doesn't look (or more importantly, feel) like freedom: one cannot help oneself. It's like Warner's depressed mouse, compelled to swim, only the compulsion, the sense of being under "another's" power, comes from within. I too would be interested in what brain science might add to this felt sense (Paul? out there teaching about Brain and Behavior? want to weigh in?).

Am also thinking what else history and literature--all those compulsives from Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina forward--might add, all those characters determined to do what they feel compelled to do, determined to claim their "freedom" to do it, but unable to free themselves from the compulsion itself.

Hm...

Hi Anne,

I suppose that what I was trying to say, in too offhand a way, is that the freedom/compulsion binary becomes impossible to determine once we make it a matter of self-observation or -reflection.  This collapse of self-reflection at certain tasks seems to be a fundamental assumption for Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis, right? (that is why we pay psychoanalysts to listen to us) but it also seems implicit in the explanations offered by the kinds of brain science that Warner feels so ambivalent about.  So under certain conditions this semantic opposition (and the knowledge it would uphold) seems to fall apart, in ways that I (and I think Warner, too) find ethically troubling.  Do we medicate the "mouse," or remove him from his cage?

DM

Hi everyone,

I sense that the discussion is petering out, because people have taken from it whatever they were looking for, but I wanted to bring forward a few points  before it shut down completely.

1.  Despite the well-known difficulties of communicating across disciplinary boundaries, I would probably question the usefulness of the "two cultures" story at this point, because it limits us to binary, mutually exclusive definitions of activities that in fact have many developing points of contact and intersection, as this blog tries to show.  My preference would be for a open-ended, multiple "publics" model along the lines described by Robbins, with each discipline addressing a virtual public that contains all the other disciplines, along with all the smaller "publics."  Important in this regard would also be Michael Warner's updating of Robbins's story, in his article and book on "Publics and counterpublics." But I suspect that scientists would have a much harder time accepting the notion that an outside public must accept their findings than humanists, because it opens the door to all sorts of notions of Creationism, pseudo-science, etc. 

2.  When scientific and humanities disciplines do learn from one another, the process is conducted at the level of metaphorical exchange, with a kind of intuitive, self-reflective learning-via-translation-and-accommodation that is officially accepted in humanistic discourse but not necessarily in scientific fields that historically defined and legitimated themselves by the radically decontextualized "objectivity" of their observations.  Elements like language, narrative, rhetoric, history, context, conditioning, the role of the individual subject as observer, all these things are interpreted very differently when these fields produce their knowledge, and cannot be treated as incidental to the stories generated.  So any possible translation from one field to the next will be affected by the fact that strategic decontextualizations have historically produced knowledge for science, while contextualizations have become one of the major vehicles for furthering knowledge in the humanities.

3.  As I have learned, some of the most interesting commonalities between scientific and humanistic learning occur at the level of teaching, when instructors are trying to enlist the curiosity of the entry-level learner, in the devising of activities capable of suggesting to learners the fundamental concepts of a field, and in the re-learning of one's own discipline under the pressure of teaching it to others.  So the commonalities, as usual, exist more at the level of practice than of "doctrine."

Conversations on Serendip wax and wane (like conversations anywhere?). I doubt this one has "petered out" but even if it were to, it has already left its mark elsewhere. See Science and Humanities Education: Learning From Each Other?

Of relevance of course is the idea that "the commonalities between scientific and humanistic learning ... exist more at the level of practice than of 'doctrine'". Maybe indeed in the context of education we can all learn to outgrow the various "doctrines" we acquired as academics.

Maybe the notion that the "outside public" is more threatening to scientists than to humanists is one of those doctrines that could go by the board? Galileo, to cite just one example, was condemned not so much for his science as for his insistence in writing about it in the vernacular, for making his observations/interpretations accessible to the public. And it actually seems to me in general that scientists are less contented with hermeneutic understandings than are humanists. Whether so or not, we could all commit ourselves anew to telling stories in publicly accessible ways, letting them become a part of the public conversation (for more on the specific case of evolution, see above and Science Matters ... How?).

"strategic decontextualizations have historically produced knowledge for science, while contextualizations have become one of the major vehicles for furthering knowledge in the humanities"

Yep, and maybe its time for both to ourgrow both, as per the recent above?

Seems to me that far from petering out, we're making some progress here. Maybe we should try and orchestrate a larger gathering on these themes?

Hi Paul,

I think that, true to my usual practice of questioning others' metaphors, I would probably describe "education" as a practice that involves the continual, mutual refinement of the language of one's training rather than simply "outgrowing" it.  With a more sophisticated understanding, we can identify the "scaffolding" concepts we used to climb up to the level of certain abstractions, and recognized those scaffolding concepts to be preliminary or naive rather than inaccurate.

So I think that the purpose of this kind of conversation is to enrich and refine one's own discipline, perhaps even to the point where it can communicate effectively to the public and to the other disciplines.

The key here is the community of inquiry, no matter how broadly or narrowly defined, and whether it picks up on one's observations and extends them further.  Isn't that how validation is supposed to work in the sciences and the humanities?

DM

Thanks, Paul, I've been following your K-16 discussion with great interest.  But, as usual, I'm still left with some questions:

1.  If the "community of inquiry" helps to test the observations/interpretations of the isolated researcher, at what point in the process does the interdisciplinary perspective need to get "tested" by others' discussion, observation, hypotheses?  If others do not pick up and extend my particular reconfiguration, say, of history, philosophy, and literary studies, for example, where does that leave my intuition of their intrinsic connections?  (This is something I spent a lot of time reflecting on while doing my Cynic book) 

This is only to say that interdisciplinarity looks and feels different when viewed from an individual scholarly perspective, as opposed to more collective models of collaboration, institutionalization, long-term historical reception, etc.  So from my point of view the major benefit of disciplinary conversation is sustained, focused yet collective attention to certain problems, a quality that can only be replicated in interdisciplinary conversation if it "strikes a chord" and really resonates among a larger group of researchers.  So what makes the difference between the isolated transdisciplinary intuition and the transdisciplinary intuition that really resonates?

2.  There seems to be a lot of discussion of using inquiry to "heal" the fragmentation of the actual research practices of humanists and scientists, and the curriculum they have helped to create.  But I wonder whether trying to address this fragmentation with student-level inquiry will only distance students from the actual problems pursued by researchers in those disciplines?  It seems to me that the difficulties of actual research problems are a powerful reality-check for both teachers and students, and keep the process of inquiry honestly openended. 

In other words, I see a contradiction between the pedagogical goal of presenting students with genuine problems, and the impulse to unify historically divergent perspectives (e.g., "two cultures" etc. etc.) 

Best,

DM

I think that this is right: begin with questions that students find relevant, or better yet, are already curious about.  Teach them inquiry by modeling it in one's own follow-up questions, and let them try to develop their own questions, so that this questioning can be extended into a systematic and continuous process of investigation (another phrase for disciplinary understanding). 

I don't know if they need to know that they are participating in a discipline.  That may be less important than the questioning they engage in.  But I think that the teacher needs to be very aware of their questioning's relation to a discipline's structures, to keep up the momentum of the discoveries, and to give them a direction.  So disciplines provide certain models of continuity and connection for students, with the aid of the teacher, to rise from one level of observation/abstraction to another.  

On the other hand, articles like this one from George Hillocks, Jr. on Inquiry and the composing process would argue that the process of composing is inextricably part the investigation process. (writing is one of the things that the arts and sciences both do, believe it or not, and would constitute another one of the commonalties that Paul is looking for). 

So the goal, I think, is for the investigator in training to integrate her tasks into some self-generated, self-reflexive, continuous process, not to master one thing, then another and another.  When I drive my car, I'm not focused on when, precisely, I need to use my hand-brake or check the odometer.

As for getting it backwards, I think that the biggest obstacle to inquiry education is not instructors, but the current prevalence of high-stakes testing and Back to Basics in K-12, only somewhat dampened by the unpopularity of NCLB (No Child Left Behind).  This is one place where the education community has never successfully communicated to the public the difficulties with these models of teaching-as-testing.

DM

"So what makes the difference between the isolated transdisciplinary intuition and the transdisciplinary intuition that really resonates?"

Very thoughtful/important question, one that I think helps to highlight a significant distinction between the intellectual and the social functions of a discpline. "Collective attention to certain problems" is indeed an intellectual advantage of disciplinary work. But disciplines are also social/political groups, and tend to enforce group cohesion whether or not it is of actual intellectual benefit. Good trandisciplinary work in the present environment pretty much depends on being willing and able to forego, at least for a time, both the intellectual and the social/political benefits of a disciplinary group. With some luck, one can then find/create new communities with whom one's own particular interests "strike a chord." Which in turn can yield the desireable intellectual benefits and, perhaps, social/political ones as well.

"I wonder whether trying to address this fragmentation with student-level inquiry will only distance students from the actual problems pursued by researchers in those disciplines? It seems to me that the difficulties of actual research problems are a powerful reality-check for both teachers and students, and keep the process of inquiry honestly openended. "

I agree very much that "the difficulties of actual research problems" are not only a powerful reality-check for both teachers and students" but an essential part of teaching inquiry. I'm less certain that "the actual problems pursued by reserchers" are the only "research problems" that one can use, or even necessarily the best ones in an educational context. Here too the issue is the nature of a discipline, and of "professional" research. Professionals tend to look for their problems within a discipline, which means the problems tend to be ones that require years of training to appreciate, much less address. They also tend to be ones that lots of other people are already working on, and that require narrow focus rather than breadth. It seems to me better in classrooms to use research problems that are more generally understandable, and for which a diversity of perspectives is more likely to be useful. In addition, my own experience is that research along these lines has at least as much chance of generating something actually interesting for the teacher as does hacking away at discipllinary problems. Again, though, there is a price to pay for taking off the disciplinary coat, both for the teacher and in some cases for students.

"On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends."

"On the Internet, you can hear from a bunch of people,” said Zachary, who will attend Columbia University this fall. “They may not be pedigreed academics. They may be someone in their shed with a conspiracy theory. But you would weigh that.”

Quotes are from a NYTimes article yesterday that seems relevant as per Literacy and the Web. My guess is that students are themselves learning to engage in transdisciplinary inquiry. If we can't learn to do it ourselves, we'll find ourselves learning it from them.

"Maybe some of our problems with understanding the relation between sciences, humanities, etc have to do with the relations being evolving ones? How about the following as a way to bring things together, both in terms of objective and in terms of time?"

A continuation of the thinking here and in our summer institute and minisymposium, with a suggestion about "classical" art, humanities, social sciences, sciences, and how one might trace their ongoing evolution into a future arts/humanities/social sciences/sciences? A future not without disciplines but with a more recognized niche for transdisciplinarians (with attendent intellectual and social/political benefits?).

"I think that the biggest obstacle to inquiry education is not instructors, but the current prevalence of high-stakes testing and Back to Basics in K-12, only somewhat dampened by the unpopularity of NCLB (No Child Left Behind). This is one place where the education community has never successfully communicated to the public the difficulties with these models of teaching-as-testing."

There is indeed a problem here and I like your inclination to attribute it at least in part to ourselves ("the education community has never successfully communicated ..."). If we are actually going to play a constructive role in cultural development (as opposed to reacting to it/bemoaning it) we indeed need to get better at engaging with/educating/encouraging inquiry in the "public." See Knowing about something and using it are different things . For all of us, a radically different education?

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the comments and the NYTimes cite.  I've been thinking about this article and its implications, too, though I agree with you that the repercussions of the new literacies (and I'd put information literacy up there too with computer literacy) are a lot less dismal than the NYTimes writer thought.  Frankly, I thought this piece by Caleb Crain in the NYer was a lot more thoughtful, along with his followup.

The question is really whether the kinds of laterally-organized, associational skimming-behavior that the internet encourages approximates transdisciplinary reading, at least by disciplined readers. I think there are similarities and differences, but I do think that training matters, and in fact matters even more when the sources and quantities of information are growing larger and more diverse hourly.

I know that I learn a tremendous amount by searching JSTOR, which is an interdisciplinary database, but even then some kind of concentrated process of information-assimilation has to take place for me.  I also know that my students will go to the same web that I do, or search the same databases that I do, and their abilities to find what they want or retain anything are dramatically less than mine.  This is what disciplinary training is supposed to do.  So even undergrad education needs to impart to students the need to focus and select from the array of potential information sources.

Frankly, I don't think disciplines, like the nation-state, are going away any time soon because they are part of the way that we organize information for use.  And I think the hardest and most interesting problem is institutionalizing the places for discussion in which transdisciplinary talk can be developed and shared with wider publics, and additional information integrated into the problem.  

Finally, I probably do agree with you that at some level of abstraction, all inquiry is one, but that kind of insight is at such a high level of abstraction that it doesn't help the literary critic and rhetorician and librarian see the commonalties, even when they read the same books.  This is because they are making different uses of the "same" material.  So I think the most interesting questions are about the concrete encounters between and among disciplines, on real and specific problems that probably do exceed the grasp of a single discipline.