The Disciplinary Perspective
All disciplines have a Disciplinary Perspective. What that means is each discipline has a way that it looks at reality and the work in a very general way. How each of these disciplines view the world influences how research and teaching within that discipline is applied. Phenomena are the subjects, objects, and behaviors that a discipline accepts into its category.
Tier System of Disciplinary Phenomena
Tier 1 Identify a discipline that has an outreach on a overall complex problem. For example, disciplines such as Sociology, Education, Anthropology, Biology, and Political Science have a specific concept/complex problem/subject matter.
Sociology: social structure
Biology: life sciences
Anthropology: culture
Tier 2 Second-level phenomenon deals with subcategories of that specific discipline.
Sociology: family, gender, race, ethnicity
Biology: nature, health, organisms, relationships
Anthropology: archeology, humanity, dynamics of worldwide cultures
Tier 3 Third-level phenomenon breaks those subcategories down even further.
Sociology: family; nuclear, blended, extended, single parent etc.
Biology: organisms; prokaryotic vs eukaryotic organisms etc.
Anthropology: cultural dynamics; gender roles, language, lifestyle etc.
Why is this important to interdisciplinary studies?
Disciplinary perspectives and disciplines themselves break down the disciplines that we all study. Each discipline requires different skills and steps of research or learning that are able to come together when studying interdisciplinary studies.
For example, I am aiming to study 'Global Educational Studies'. This major contains three disciplines, TESOL, Spanish, and International Relations. Here is how the tier system works with my program, and how I am planning to focus on different phenomena.
Tier 1:
TESOL: education
Spanish: language
International Relations: global focus
Tier 2:
TESOL: language, linguistics, teaching, learning
Spanish: Language, communication, culture
International Relations: politics, history, geography
Tier 3:
TESOL: linguistics; vocabulary, phonology, formation of words and sentences
Spanish: culture; Spain, regional, food, lifestyle
International Relations: politics; global awareness, international social work, social inequalities
Works Cited: Repko, Allen F.; Szostak, Richard (Rick); Buchberger, Michelle Phillips (2013-05-20). Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies. SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.