{"id":3212,"date":"2022-11-20T21:32:56","date_gmt":"2022-11-20T08:32:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/?p=3212"},"modified":"2023-01-25T14:06:37","modified_gmt":"2023-01-25T01:06:37","slug":"its-not-on-to-play-one-discipline-off-against-another","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2022\/11\/its-not-on-to-play-one-discipline-off-against-another\/","title":{"rendered":"it&#8217;s not on to play one discipline off against another"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The topic of an ad for a university not that far to the north of where I live popped up in casual conversation today. It was &#8211; IMHO &#8211; a pretty awful advert, with the implication that science doesn&#8217;t change so do an arts degree if you want to think differently. I mean, yuck.<\/p>\n<p>But what was just as bad, to me and to others in the conversation, was some of the responses: &#8220;A BA? Do you want fries with that?&#8221; It wasn&#8217;t a particular funny joke when it first came out years ago &amp; I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s aged well: it&#8217;s not really any better than the ad we were complaining about.<\/p>\n<p>To be honest, I think the &#8220;fries with that&#8221; comment is a throwaway line that shows a lack of thought about &amp;\/or understanding of what&#8217;s involved in an arts or social sciences degree, and where those degrees can take their graduates. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.universitiesnz.ac.nz\/graduate-outcomes\">Te P\u014dkai Tara NZ Universities has some tools on their website<\/a> that use information from the 2018 Census to show where graduates from various degree programs end up (and what they were earning in those jobs). There&#8217;s some background to the tools <a href=\"https:\/\/universitiesnz.shinyapps.io\/graduateoutcomesonlinetool\/_w_476e598b\/#!\/\">here<\/a>, &amp; you can look up <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nzgraduateoutcomes.ac.nz\/FieldOfStudy\">employment outcomes by field of study<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But wait, there&#8217;s more. It&#8217;s worth remembering that<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2008\/07\/science-as-a-human-endeavour\/\">Science is a creative endeavour<\/a>, and as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ebsco.com\/blogs\/ebscopost\/steamy-relationship-between-art-and-science\">this brief blog post points out<\/a>, &#8220;[a] great deal of creativity is required to make scientific breakthroughs, and art is just as often an expression of (or a product of) scientific knowledge.&#8221; In fact, art is a tool that can be used to communicate about science, and I remember attending <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2018\/02\/what-are-the-challenges-for-first-year-core-science-courses\/\">a symposium presentation<\/a> on the use of visual art projects to enable students to explore what biology meant to them.<\/li>\n<li>These days undergraduate degrees (with the exception of highly specialised programs) give students the opportunity to take a range of subjects outside their major: someone with a science major may also have a minor in economics, or geography, or education, or&#8230; Of course minors can also come from complementary sciences, but many students welcome the opportunity to gain a broader perspective on the world than might be provided by a singular science focus. Science students can &#8211; &amp; I believe they should &#8211; take papers about critical thinking\u00b9, philosophy &amp;\/or history of science, ethics, and communication: papers that may often be delivered in an Arts Faculty but which provide additional depth &amp; breadth to a science degree.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/why-arts-and-science-are-better-together-15004\">And as this article in the <em>Conversation<\/em><\/a> (Miller &amp; White, 2013) argues, there&#8217;s a lot of value in such combined programs of study, which can &#8211; if designed properly &#8211; let students develop valuable transdisciplinary skills\u00b2. However, Miller &amp; White also note that to get there we need &#8220;[an] innovative approach to curriculum design [that]would involve experts from various fields. They would collaborate to design a curricula space where students actively connect and extend the diverse aspects of their education.&#8221; I&#8217;m not sure that we&#8217;re quite there yet, in terms of the ability to make those active connections, but it does mean that we really should not be playing individual disciplines against each other &#8211;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p>After all, while few would doubt the value of disciplined thinking, isn\u2019t our goal also to prepare students for lifelong learning in an undisciplined world?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u00b9 a well-designed BA (or BSocSc) degree gives its graduates skills in critical and analytical thinking; these are not attributes restricted to those in the sciences, and can be applied in all walks of life. (It&#8217;s also entirely possible to take a science subject as a second major in a BA&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>\u00b2 where &#8220;Transdisciplinarity is characterised by knowledge production that is problem-focused, draws knowledge and methods flexibly from diverse sources, involves collaboration between academic disciplines and other parts of society, and produces knowledge that is \u2018socially robust\u2019&#8221; (<a href=\"https:\/\/link.springer.com\/article\/10.1007\/s10734-007-9076-2\">Russell, Dolnicar &amp; Ayoub, 2008<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The topic of an ad for a university not that far to the north of where I live popped up in casual conversation today. It was &#8211; IMHO &#8211; a pretty awful advert, with the implication that science doesn&#8217;t change so do an arts degree if you want to think differently. I mean, yuck. But [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":2937,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,43,71],"tags":[49,3,40,10,44,59,56],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>it&#039;s not on to play one discipline off against another : BioBlog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2022\/11\/its-not-on-to-play-one-discipline-off-against-another\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"it&#039;s not on to play one discipline off against another : BioBlog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The topic of an ad for a university not that far to the north of where I live popped up in casual conversation today. 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