COSERE | 51 What exactly is interdisciplinary collaboration? “In interdisciplinary learning, learners draw on two or more disciplines to advance their understanding of a subject or problem that extends beyond the scope of any single discipline. Learners integrate and develop information, concepts, methodologies, and procedures from two or more disciplines to gain new knowledge, understanding, and skills, and to explain or solve problems” (Graham et. al, 2023). By extension, then, you have probably already surmised that interdisciplinary collaboration is simply a joint effort by educational professionals from two or more different disciplines in their professional practice. Exactly how this manifest can vary depending on the nature of the joint-effort, however, more often than not, the end-goal is exactly that which Graham describes above: an enhanced learning experience with better outcomes for students. Interdisciplinary collaboration, necessitating some level of new knowledge creation on the parts of both the educators involved as well as the students that their collaboration will go on to inform, enjoys a great deal of synergy with constructivism and experiential learning. In the case of the former, for example, educators and students engaging outside the traditional scope of their discipline by integrating another will almost assuredly compare and contrast this newfound knowledge with that which they have already internalized; thereby constructing new knowledge. The experience, furthermore, of continually interacting with a new secondary or tertiary discipline is an ongoing learning process and, ultimately, an active experiment. In other words, it is an inherently experiential process. The theory, then, is demonstrably relevant. But what are the benefits? Benefits of Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Understanding the impact on student learning. One common observation that relates to interdisciplinary collaboration is that “Disciplines may… be inward-looking and fail to address new and relevant realworld problems, whereas major new insights and breakthroughs increasingly occur in interdisciplinary areas” (Graham et. al, 2023). Education can sometimes suffer from the issue of becoming siloed. A school’s Business department may feel no connection whatsoever, beyond existing within the same institution, to the History department, for example. An instance of interdisciplinary collaboration between educators from these two, seemingly unrelated, disciplines could result in joint lessons on the emergence of the modern economic system, chronicling its ties to historical models such as mercantilism (as one possible example). A lesson of this nature would open
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