LE310 Unit 6 Lecture

Three Types of Integration

Unit 6: lecture

Unit 6: lecture

In the last few units, you've seen that interdisciplinarity is not just about combining disciplines. It is also about taking a critical eye towards the disciplines that you are considering combining. Interdisciplinarians do not just take disciplinary insights at face value. They examine their assumptions, biases, methods, and theories to understand how the person writing came to that insight. (Though keep in mind, this is not to say that they doubt the truth of the disciplinary insight. Remember that often it is about appreciating the truth and usefulness of the disciplinary insight.)

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Unit 6: lecture

four methods of integration

When studying the complex topics that require an interdisciplinary approach, you will often find that several different disciplines have insights into the topic. If each discipline were just to present its insight into the topic without any attempt to combine those insights, we would have a case of multidisciplinarity. Remember in order to move from multidisciplinarity to interdiscipinarity, we have to do something with those insights. Somehow we have to combine them. The technical term for combining is called synthesis or integration. So, naturally, in interdisciplinary studies, you have to learn methods for integrating separate disciplinary insights so that you can come to a more comprehensive understanding of a topic. Integration is not the end product all by itself. Rather by integrating, we come to greater understanding. Sometimes we call that greater understanding more comprehensive or holistic understanding.

Repko, Szostak, and Buchberger cite four different types of integration in your introductory textbook:

Problem-centered

Conceptualization

Contextualization

Primarily used in the humanities and in histroy

Occurs when people from different disciplines come together to do something about a difficult problmem.

Primarily used in the sciences

Repko, Szostak, and Buchberger (2017) believe all three of these methods of integration are "incomplete", because they do not take all possible ways of integrating the disciplines into account. Let’s look at their criticism of each:

Unit 6: lecture

four methods of integration (cont.)

Problem-centered

Conceptualization

Contextualization

They are also not systematic methods and may obscure the practice of how integration occurs -- resting on faith rather than a replicable method. Nevertheless, all three can lead to interesting results.

This integration tends to ignore “specific assumptions, concepts, theories, and methods” (Repko, Szostak, and Buchberger 2017: 236).

Limitations- does not tend to include perspectives, assumptions, concepts or theories from the disciplines .

Will only work well for disciplines that are very close to one another

Unit 6: lecture

The Broad Model of Integration

You'll learn a lot more detail in Unit 7, but Repko, Szostak, and Buchberger believe that the Broad Model fixes almost all of the flaws of the previous three. Like the problem-centered integration strategy, the Broad Model starts with a complex problem or topic. However, unlike the other three methods, the Broad Model holds out hope to be a systematic way to integrate insights. It attempts to do this by incorporating the following "fixes" to the problem-centered approach:

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The goal of integration

As noted earlier, integration isn't really the goal in and of itself. It is a means to gain the true goal of an interdisciplinary study: a more holistic or comprehensive understanding of an issue, topic, or problem. The kind of understanding just isn't available from one discipline alone. The hope is that this kind of understanding is unique, and can be brought to bear on a complex problem to put it into a whole new light. This comprehensive understanding does not privilege the perspective of any one discipline, but is only possible because someone attempts to integrate the disciplines and create the understanding.

works cited