Different, Difficult, and Local: A Review of Interdisciplinary Teaching Activities

This review addresses a lacuna in the literature concerning interdisciplinary teaching by analyzing peer-reviewed articles that discuss empirical evidence of interdisciplinary teaching practices. The article reports on the wide array of purposes, approaches and designs of interdisciplinary teaching and learning found in the review, but an important, more general, point is that interdisciplinary teaching is, consistently, considered different from normal practices, hence positioning interdisciplinary teaching and learning as the other. This othering could be detrimental to establishing sustainable interdisciplinary educational provision. Our analysis suggests a need for stressing interdisciplinary practices as local, rather than as generalizable propositions.