On UBC’s campus, the separation of disciplines manifests not only in the words on a diploma, but geographically as well. I feel this separation in my own legs as they strain to carry me from Buchanan to the Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems (ICICS) building every Wednesday afternoon. On this marathon day of three ‘back-to-backs,’ I shuttle first from Buchanan to ICICS, and then return to Buchanan for my final three-hour-long class.
Commuting on foot causes tardiness that even I, a fast walker, can’t seem to avoid. I lament that UBC is planned such that a student cannot walk from a computer science class to a creative writing class within 10 minutes. This inability to move myself between my required courses on time (barring the purchase of a bike or electric scooter) became a stumbling block which provoked me to think about why I have this problem in the first place.
I became a media studies student out of fear of pigeonholing myself. When choosing where to attend university almost four years ago, my predilection was to pick a degree program that would give me the most variety. I have always wanted to study everything; at least in the way of arts and technology. Media studies reflects this desire for the interdisciplinary in its range of courses, but not in its name. I recently spoke to Dr. Clayton Ashton, chair of another UBC cohort — interdisciplinary studies — to compare his views on the program to my experience with interdisciplinary study as a way of learning.
“I think [the program] provides a mixture of things. Some of them are kind of intangible in a way,” said Ashton. Beyond a student’s desire for variety, a degree in interdisciplinary studies can make them “more adaptable to different scenarios, because you’re comfortable working from multiple different perspectives or disciplinary backgrounds … You have to be able to find a way to fit them together, almost like puzzle pieces, to do something unique.” This task requires critical thinking muscles, communication skills and adopting a mindset of correspondence: where theoretical and practical experience across a breadth of academic subjects are allowed the space to commune and influence each other.
On a long walk, what else is there to do but think? Thinking as one moves is a great method for working something out, spending time with an issue in order to see different sides of it and cultivate understanding. It is the time spent between point A and point B (in my case, along Main Mall) where ideas are allowed to meld. The lingering thoughts from my media theory course are settling at the same time that I start thinking about what we’ll be doing in my course on human-computer interaction.
That feeling when one course’s content connects to another’s in a completely unexpected way is a large part of what fuels my motivation in university, along with my sense of wonder in the world. These connections materialize like justified rivers on a page — quiet and invisible truths that appear only when you take a step back from the words to see the space as a whole. There’s a one-line prayer in Sufi mysticism (which I learned about from a great book of literary fiction called Martyr!) that puts it simply: “Oh Lord, increase my bewilderment.”
Wading in the uncertain has always been my modus operandum, evoking in me a mixture of frustration and delight. I remember being in second or third grade driving to school with my dad, always asking him questions, often related to science and humanity. I wanted to understand things about the world around me. I wanted to know why. I would ask my dad until he could no longer provide an explanation. However, I never gave up on that urge to keep feeling my way through the water.
Studying through an interdisciplinary lens today, I have found myself in a process of unlearning, relearning, and even learning how to learn. The scholar Gregory Bateson called this “deutero-learning” or “triple-loop learning.” These terms describe a high-level sense of how things happen in the world, developed by relating smaller proto-learnings. In other words, it is a person’s understanding of the context in which their own learning occurs. This means learning with different pieces of knowledge, rather than about those pieces. Deutero-learning becomes extremely useful as a skill when applied to large-scale topics.
Ashton explained that a key importance of interdisciplinary study is that “it offers an approach to big, complicated problems.” He put forward the idea that “considering the complexity of the issues we're facing today … whether it's understanding the relationship between climate and economics, or science, or communications … I think each of these problems has so many facets. The ability to think about these problems from multiple perspectives allows us to begin to grasp how to actually approach them, because you can see the many ways into that problem.”
Now, as I struggle with my backpack falling off my shoulder and my umbrella shaking in the wind on those rainy day walks, I’m not purely preoccupied with how to save the world with the interdisciplinary ideas from my classes. I just want to feel the sun on my back, so to speak. What does that is a sense of wonder inside me, fed by discovery.
For students who declared their major a long time ago but might be feeling bored or not fully satisfied with their choices (in terms of available courses or paths beyond their degree), there are ways to re-enchant yourself with learning through embracing an interdisciplinary mindset and taking personal action.
My first suggestion comes from Ashton, who encourages students to “make good use of electives,” and keep an eye out for events and opportunities to engage with public scholarship. Stepping outside of the panels, talks and networking opportunities that you think are meant for you is a great way to exchange perspectives and meet people who have an alternate approach to issues that you may also be interested in.
Ashton emphasized that a lot of the time, departments and faculty are looking to connect with students regardless of major. One of the best ways to engage in interdisciplinary thinking, for him, lies in “viewing the university as a big public institution where you're invited to many different places, rather than feeling like once you have a major you have to stick to that area.”
Using your resources and viewing the whole world as a place of study is the key to staying curious and interested. The library offers one of the greatest opportunities to learn for free on whatever subject you want to know more about. If you live on campus, why not spend more time browsing the endless shelves in Koerner’s basement, or looking through a magnifying lens at microfiche in IKB? If you live off-campus like me, you’re also eligible to sign up for a Vancouver Public Library card, which gives you access to a wealth of additional workbooks, magazines, memoirs, fiction and more. Coming to love reading based on your interests — fiction, non-fiction, whatever — is a powerful way to stay connected to learning throughout your entire life.
So what have I learned from my ghastly Wednesday schedule? For one, the infrastructures of our campus and of academia in general may be lagging behind the kind of academic experience students want in this day and age: the “age of information.” Many of us pick up tens, if not hundreds, of tiny pieces of information along our daily scroll of TikTok or Instagram Reels, which contribute to our immense network of schemas about the world. The challenge facing learners today is not necessarily the attainment of knowledge, but rather determining what information is actually important to know, and how we can apply it to our work, study and interpersonal relationships.
This is where the institution of higher education and the university can help us out; not only by increasing the depth of what we know about a subject, but also guiding us to discover how our knowledge connects with other ways of learning, understanding and knowing across time, space and perspective.
Lastly, I have realized that learning is not a path you follow until you reach some “end,” like a job, expert status or a blind plunge into innovation. As an agent over my own course, my learning will mediate people, places and ideas for my whole life. I will walk back and forth and back and forth, trying to untangle what I thought I knew in order to discover a different approach, or the approach that bridges two others. It will take choosing the hike every time in order to increase my own bewilderment.
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