Politiques et pratiques d'interdisciplinarite´

Nadia Assimopoulos
, Charles H. Belanger

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1970 decade, the Université de Montréal moved to make its curricular approach more open to interdisciplinarity. This departure from traditional distribution requirements was regarded as the solution sought to meet new socio-economic realities such as financial constraints, expansion of knowledge, and student demands for more relevance. A fter a few years of policy implementation on that matter, many individ-uals and committees within the Institution had become inquisitive about the degree of effectiveness of those policies. The purpose of this study is threefold: to determine the magnitude of the range set up by departments in their degree program structures to give students an opportunity to take courses outside their basic disciplines; to assess the degree of students' responsiveness to utilize course offerings outside their basic disciplines; and to measure the ability of departments to attract non-major students from related and foreign disciplines. The results indicate that although departments modified their degree program structures to conform to the interdisciplinary objective, over-specialization still prevails. Student majors have a tendency not to take advantage of the more flexible degree program structures to go out of their basic disciplines; when they do consume credit hours outside their departments, they do so mostly in related disciplines. It appears that, in order to imple-ment interdisciplinary practices, minimum standards for breadth and maximum standards for depth need to be set up.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

Published

1980-12-31



Section

Articles



License

Copyright in the article is vested with the Author under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/. Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).


How to Cite

Assimopoulos, N., & Belanger, C. H. (1980). Politiques et pratiques d’interdisciplinarite´. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 10(2), 39–52. https://doi.org/10.47678/cjhe.v10i2.182818