Interdisciplinary approach towards education can help embed necessary soft skills in students and make them job ready. Professor Ranjan Bose tells you how

Today, we face a wide range of challenges, such as controlling pollution, understanding global warming, disaster mitigation, traffic-safety, low-cost healthcare, energy and food scarcity, to name a few.  All these challenges cross the boundaries of any one discipline. Experts from different domains must work together to provide practical solutions to these problems. In a nutshell, all these problems are interdisciplinary.

Education in India is presently going through interesting times and also facing some hard questions regarding its relevance in the current scenario.  It has emerged that, of the 15 million graduates entering the market each year, about 75 per cent lack the basic soft-skills and technical know-how to execute even the core tasks of their job profiles. A McKinsey report indicates that only 25 per cent of Indian engineers are actually employable and the numbers can further fall down to less than 20 percent if the condition doesn’t improve on time. What should be done to address the problem?  Can interdisciplinary education address part of the problem by equipping our students with skills to understand and solve real-world problems?  Can an interdisciplinary research mindset nudge our students towards creative problem solving?

The words ‘multidisciplinary’, ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘trans-disciplinary’ are used a lot. In a multidisciplinary approach, each discipline contributes a piece of the jigsaw and it is actually an addition of parts.  Interdisciplinary approach, on the other hand, integrates domain knowledge of different fields, different ways of working and different methods of problem solving.  So, it has a multiplicative effect. Trans-disciplinary work permeates through several disciplines in a manner such that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Thinking differently

The foundation of interdisciplinary education is based on the core idea of the constructive paradigm. It suggests that students can create their own understanding and knowledge of the world by integrating new experiences with alternate ideas through theoretical exploration and practical exposure. However, interdisciplinary education is much more than that.  It enables us to learn how to think in a way that is different from the way we are used to thinking in our own field.  It empowers us to break silos.

 Towards this goal of thinking differently, our educational institutes should provide an enabling platform where students can develop their interdisciplinary skills along with their regular study programmes. For this to happen, the educators first need to get out of their silos. Class projects should be floated with students and supervisors from different disciplines.  Experts from different walks of life should regularly interact with students to broaden their thought processes and the ability to assimilate new ideas.  The whole college campus should be transformed into a tinkering-lab of ideas from various domains.  This enabling environment should also teach our students to work in teams in a coherent fashion and respect alternate view-points.

Degrees

From the perspective of education, there can be many different degrees of inter-disciplinarity.  We can have inter-disciplinarity associated with class-activities and projects, for example, a class-project that requires students to build a mobile-phone based app to monitor and control soil-moisture remotely.  Students from different disciplines/departments can work on such projects.  At the next level of granularity, the courses can be interdisciplinary, for example, a course on Algorithms in Computational Biology.  And finally, we can have entire programmes that are interdisciplinary, for example, BTech  in Computer Science and Social Sciences.  

From the perspective of research, there can also be many different degrees of inter-disciplinarity.  An expert in computer science may collaborate with an expert in social sciences to solve a problem related to social-media analytics. Collaborations can happen between two areas of specialisation, for example, an expert in liquid crystals can work with a material scientist within the domain of applied physics to develop new types of sensors.  Different domains can fuse together to generate new research areas, for example computational biology (which is itself interdisciplinary) has merged with gastronomical science to produce the interesting area of computational gastronomy. As we go ahead with the notion of interdisciplinary education and research, we should be conscious about these different degrees of inter-disciplinarity and use them appropriately.

Other benefits

Building connections amongst disparate concepts are crucial learning elements provided in the framework of interdisciplinary education.  Here are some other benefits of interdisciplinary education:

• Students are more likely to pursue interdisciplinary topics that are interesting to them, especially if they are rooted in real-world problems. Consequently, the learning has more meaning, coupled with a real purpose, and is likely to stay with the student for a lifetime.
• Students learn to consolidate knowledge after synthesising ideas from different perspectives. This further develops critical thinking, unstructured problem solving and research abilities of the students and pushes them to think beyond boundaries.  They appreciate the notion of similarity and differences by considering contrasting viewpoints from various subject areas.
• Even in the slowdown phase of a particular industry, future engineers with a degree in interdisciplinary studies will have an edge to nimbly switch to another sector.
• An interdisciplinary education can nudge students towards taking up entrepreneurial ventures.
• It will teach our students to remain relevant in this ever-morphing world, where the expectations from engineers will undoubtedly change completely in the next decade or so.

Interdisciplinary education strengthens the cognitive abilities of students. The students learn to cross mental borders, respect other people’s points of view and communicate their own ideas to people from other domains.  They further develop the capacity to question assumptions, think in creative and innovative ways, and solve unstructured problems. Development of these important soft-skills are a direct consequence of interdisciplinary education. 

It is the joint responsibility of the educational system and the student-body to become aware of our rapidly changing world and to take appropriate action from the perspective of interdisciplinary education.

The writer is Director, IIIT-Delhi