The Limits of a Metaphor

 Why do we teach our subjects?  What are disciplines good for?  What constitutes a discipline?  How do they relate to each other?  What is interdisciplinarity, and what is it good for?

 Real world issues and disciplines (Invasion of Iraq, Global Warming, creating a learning society)  How are disciplinary boundaries created?  Are disciplines akin to countries or cultures?  What happens when disciplines combine?

 What is your discipline essentially about? What knowledge, problems, questions and issues does your discipline consider?  What are the main purposes and aims of your discipline?  What are the main methods applied in your discipline?  How do the experts and of practitioners in your discipline organize themselves in their inquiry and practice?  What forms do their productions of knowledge take?  How do practitioners in your discipline approach or establish truth, or achieve certainty? How do they convince other practitioners of their claims?  What counts as error?  What counts as evidence?  What is the role of interpretation and perception in your discipline?  How can one detect subjectivity and bias in your discipline, and what value is placed on objectivity?  How is creativity in your discipline understood? Does it permit any role for the imagination?

 Using the responses to the questions in the previous slide, discuss similarities and differences between the disciplines in your groups.  Find at least TWO things (e.g., terms, concepts, theories, insights, metaphors, models) from your colleague’s discipline that is of interest or value to you personally, or in your discipline.  Give a colleague or student from another discipline TWO reasons why he or she should study your own.  Find a question or problem that can be investigated more fruitfully by integrating your own discipline and one of your colleagues’. What problems might such an investigation encounter? 

 Are disciplines akin to countries or cultures?  What correspond to disciplinary borders, and what happens when they are crossed?  If you had to design your own system of education, how would you organize learning? By disciplines, by skills, or on some other basis?  What might be some objections to your proposal, and obstacles to carrying them out?  How can disciplines be integrated in the study of the world?

 Why are our subjects worth teaching?  What metaphor (apart from “map-territory”) would you employ to describe the relationship between the world and our understandings of it?  How, if at all, have you changed your mind as a result of this discussion?