Towards interdisciplinarity: emerging patterns of discourses during collaborative multidisciplinary modeling

We live in an increasingly complex world, in which societal well-being largely depends on the individual’s ability to integrate multiple forms of epistemologies and create new knowledge. Yet, despite the necessity to nurture this ability from an early age, our educational systems still educate students in silos, and research literature has not paid much attention to the identification of effective pedagogies to support interdisciplinary learning. The overarching goal of this study is to address this gap and examine emerging patterns in students’ discourse, while engaging in a multidisciplinary collaborative scientific modeling task. Grounded in the principles of knowledge-building communities, the task required students from different scientific disciplines (biology, physics, and chemistry) to collaboratively figure out the effect of alcohol on their bodies. Based on the framework of pragmatic constructionism for interdisciplinary understanding, we analyzed the discourse of three multidisciplinary groups of high school students. Three patterns of interdisciplinary discourse emerged from this analysis, differing in the extent to which students succeeded in merging their perspectives and creating new types of knowledge. These patterns were related to students’ engagement in the four cognitive processes of interdisciplinary understanding: establishing a purpose; weighing disciplinary insights; building and leveraging integrations; and maintaining a critical stance. This study demonstrated the potential of collaborative multidisciplinary modeling tasks to foster an interdisciplinary discourse and highlights the need to identify appropriate scaffolds to enhance their effectiveness.