Volume 25, Number 1, March, 2003

Institutionalizing Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Study: A Case Study from Pitzer College. An Article by Joe Parker, Pitzer College. In the late 1980s, the faculty and senior staff at Pitzer College adopted six educational objectives in response to changing conceptions of higher education. Three of the objectives were quite traditional for liberal arts institutions, and the other three were articulated as Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Intercultural Understanding, and Concern with Social Responsibility and Ethical Implications of Knowledge and Action. Through these last objectives Pitzer was responding to social issues as part of its founding vision in the mid 1960s emphasizing the social sciences among the Claremont, California consortium of liberal arts colleges. After the passage of these objectives, Pitzer's senior staff and faculty worked to implement them through hiring for three interdisciplinary positions and pursued funding for curricular development. How these objectives are now institutionalized is representative of many of the compromises with the disciplines and obstacles to intercultural learning that characterize many colleges and universities.

New Directory of Interdisciplinary PhD Programs. Article by Rick Szostak, University of Alberta. A recent addition to the AIS website (www.muohio.edu/ais/) is the AIS Directory of Interdisciplinary PhD Programs in the United States. The Association for Integrative Studies hopes that this Directory will aid prospective PhD students who desire an interdisciplinary education. We also hope that the Directory will be useful to scholars and administrators who wish to know if and where certain sorts of interdisciplinary program exist. The website provides details on the scJope of the Directory and the criteria for inclusion.

Job Opening

Call for Proposals

• The 25th Annual Conference of the Association for Integrative Studies, October 9-12, 2003, hosted by the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Urban, Labor and Metropolitan Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit Michigan. With proposal submission form.

Internatinal Integrative Education. Article by Peg Downes, Professor, Department of Literature & Language, The University of North Carolina, Asheville. In colleges and universities around the world, new interdisciplinary liberal arts programs are emerging and gaining strength - especially in nations struggling even harder than we are to maintain, or to establish, participatory democracies. Though this movement is stimulated in part by the increasing popularity and succcess of interdisciplinary studies in U.S. institutions of higher educations, its proponents abroad are building programs out of clearly native materials, though not infrequently with American models in mind. To the benefit of our own American educational programs, I believe, it's essential that we realize the richness of these global innovations and learn from them.

Interdisciplinarity at Work. Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching among College and University Faculty, by Lisa R. Lattuca. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001. Reviewed by Hue-ping Chin, Assistant Professor of the Interdisciplinary Studies Center, Drury University. In the last three decades, the growth of interdisciplinary studies has become apparent, both in number and in status. The theories of interdisciplinary studies (IDS) have gradually established a firm ground and the literature of IDS has mushroomed dealing with theories, practices, and assessments. More institutions require interdisciplinary courses and encourage interdisciplinary work among faculty. But how does the actual practice of interdisciplinary scholarship affect our understanding of interdisciplinarity? In Creating Interdisciplinarity, Lisa R. Lattuca, currently assistant professor of higher education in the Department of Leadership, Foundations, and Counseling Psychology at Loyola University, tests the IDS theories through lengthy and thoughtful interviews of thirty-eight faculty members engaged in interdisciplinary teaching and research. She observes interdisciplinarity in practice, analyzes the relationship between interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity, and offers a different approach to further understand interedisciplinarity in a growing diversity of our academic communities.

Reflective Interdisciplinary Teaching: Insights From the Drury Conference. Article by Rick Szostak, University of Alberta. It was intriguing to observe in several sessions at last Fall's AIS conference sponsored by Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, that those involved in interdisciplinary programs were wondering if these programs could and should be enhanced by the inclusion of course material that reflected on the nature of interdisciplinarity itself: what is interdisciplinarity?; why do we do it?; how is it best performed?; is there some overarching framework into which interdisciplinary analysis can be placed so that students can readily integrate beyond their course material? ... It is often noted that many collegee programs - disciplinary, interdisciplinary, general education - do a poor job of telling students what they will gain from the experience. We likely all want our students to learn how and why to integrate. If we were to make this goal more explicit, we would likely make the means of achieving it more explicit as well.

Individualized IDS Programs

Volume 25, Number 3, October, 2003

Our 25th Anniversary: New Hopes and Plans. A Report from Carolyn Haynes, President, Association for Integrative Studies, 2001-2003. The Association for Integrative Studies is about to celebrate its 25th year anniversary. In the last two-and-a-half decades, AIS has undergone many changes and improvements - including achieving greater national visibility and sponsoring a host of publications and other projects which have helped to raise the awareness of interdisciplinary studies and integrative learning across the country. At the same time that it has embraced change, it has also maintained a remarkable consistency, particularly in terms of retaining a loyal cadre of members a well as a highly effective and devoted executive director. As AIS moves into its next phase, it is important that it continue to thrive by attracting talented and loyal members and leaders. In order to help ensure the organization's continued success, I and the other members of the AIS Board of Directors decided in 2002 to undergo a strategic planning process. [The report includes details of the planning process, key findings of a self-study, and results of a strategic planning retreat.]

The AIS Constitution and Bylaws (with proposed additions and deletions)

Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry: A Postdoctoral Program.Washington University announces the fouth year of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Program designed to encourage interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching across the humanities and social sciences.

Job Opening

Call for Papers

Volume 25, Number 4, December, 2003

Learning Values Lifelong or Creating a Humane World. Learning Values Lifelong: From Inert Ideas to Wholes, by Michael M. Kazanjian. In Value Inquiry Book Series, Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi B.V., 2002. Reviewed by Beth Casey, Professor of English, Bowling Green State University. Michael M. Kazanjian's Learning Values Lifelong seeks to develop a process philosophy of lifelong learning with a holistic perspective on values - a term we hear a great deal about today in education. The author states that his subject is "rehumanization" by which he means eliminating the dehumanization brought about by the present system of organization and production in both the workplace and the academy that results in students and workers finding themselves leading empty repetitious lives. Human beings can grow and develop, according to Kazanjian only if we rehumanize the workplace and academia by emphasizing "the values of community, continual maturity, and human dignity" (1). Since universities today are among the more oppressive of our social institutions, in his view, a transformation for academia would most certainly be implied.

Klein and Newell Win Boulding Award for Long-Standing Achievement in Interdisciplinary Studies. At the recent AIS Annual Conference in Detroit, Michigan, Julie Thompson Klein and William H. Newell were awarded the esteemed Kenneth E. Boulding Award. ... The Boulding Award is given to a person who has clarified or expanded the concept and the scholarly or public understanding of interdisciplinarity through a combination of the following: teaching, scholarship, and integrative community involvement. ... Because of these two individuals' outstanding and long-standing contributions to the field of interdisciplinary studies, they were both accorded this prestigious honor.