Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinarity is the combination of methods and insight from more than one academic discipline into a single course of study or research project, used to address problems that no single field can adequately explain on its own, such as environmental change or public health. In education, interdisciplinary programs, for example in women's studies or environmental science, ask students to draw on several fields at once, developing cognitive flexibility and preparing them to handle complex real-world problems rather than narrowly bounded academic exercises. Some advanced programs go further and make the practice of interdisciplinarity itself an object of study, examining how disciplines interact and where their boundaries genuinely lie. The word is a twentieth-century coinage, but the underlying impulse to unite different kinds of knowledge reaches back to ancient Greek philosophy. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/