Formation in a World with Rapid Reshuffling of Knowledge

One of the tenets of Ignatian pedagogy is that the mind and spirit of the student in formation is shaped to serve others. More and more believe that new combinations of knowledge will be required to make progress on unsolved world problems of the coming years. The new combinations will group together humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences in ways that are not traditional within the departments and units of most universities. So, building women and men for others is going to require real skills at navigating across disciplines.

For Georgetown, the need to prepare leaders to work on these problems poses special urgencies. How can we provide undergraduate and graduate students with authentic experiences of mixing together different ways of approaching a problem and different knowledge domain that might inform solutions? Further, if we gave students such interdisciplinary experiences on real problems, how could we avoid cheating them of the value of going deep into a single discipline?

One possible vision of the future is that all students maintain traditional majors, permitting them a glimpse of the edges of some field. Going deeper, under proper curricular design and mentoring, permits the student to do real research. Research require the step of creation important in formation. It is the vehicle of approaching an old problem with new perspectives, of discovering a new feature previously unexamined, or of creating something never imagined by the student before. The import of research in formation, no matter what the field, is that the skills of probing deeper and deeper, of challenging oneself through self-criticism, and of experiencing the deep pleasure of such activities, are often transferable to many parts of one’s life. Original research in some field seems a prerequisite to effective participation in interdisciplinary problem-solving.

However, another needed feature for the future may be deliberate mechanisms to supplement the deep experience of the major focus, with a broader experience working in an interdisciplinary team. In such an environment, the student would by design be working on a problem with someone from a distinctly different perspective. They would be united in subordinating themselves to the problem, each bringing to the problem their own perspective on an approach to the solution. Instead of judging performance of the individual, a greater emphasis might be placed on the integration of approaches by the team. The learning environment would reward peer-reciprocated teaching of different approaches, translation of concepts and perspectives, and synthesis of knowledge – all in service of solving a problem.
The instructors in such environments would be experts in the problem, but fully supportive of finding new approaches. Ideally, they too would represent different sets of expertise.

Such learning environments might ideally be simultaneously research environments, gathering together faculty from multiple disciplines all united in attacking an important problem. In that way, the bridge between education and research could effectively be constructed. (I note there are environments already effectively doing this at Georgetown.)

Thinking of undergraduates only, then, during the four year each would have a traditional major and one or more “problem areas” that they would experience. The documentation on the major might look quite like that currently in a college transcript; the documentation of the problem area experience would be a supplement to the transcript, listing the various disciplines that the student applied in the problem area, group products and learning outcomes of the group.

So, with such a future, two undergraduates meeting for the first time might not just ask the question, “what’s your major?” but “what’s your major and what are your problem areas?”