Abstract
The need for interdisciplinary approaches has arisen from the apprehension that specialisation of research and its solidifying organisational structure has become an impediment to innovation and development. Since disciplinary knowledge is considered generalised, decontextualised and reductionist in nature, it is not adequate to tackle the practical problems. In a discipline, certain forms of knowledge are clearly privileged at the expense of alternative approaches. In this backdrop, Breaking the Silo is a critique of disciplinary mode of teaching and research that promotes a particular kind of knowledge, which is inadequate to address the exigencies of the rapidly changing world.
It is a compilation of personal experiences of scholars who experimented between 2006 and 2014 to develop the pedagogical practices for integrated science education in India. Hailing from different disciplinary backgrounds, a group of scholars undertook collaborative steps to develop courses and pedagogic material/ methods to address the problems of disciplinary divides and to find ways to overcome the compartmentalisation of knowledge (p. xix). All essays in the book are thematically arranged under three broad sections, each throwing new light on ‘two cultures’ theory and illustrating the fragmented and divisive approaches practiced in Indian academia.
In the first section, Raina et al. have effectively sketched out the historical evolution of science education and its relations with society in post Independent India. While elucidating the intermittent attempts made at several universities, they demonstrated how these efforts shaped not only the discourses on science–society relationship but also examined the viability of scientific methods to solve the problems in real life.
In a conversational mode with a natural scientist, one of the editors, Niranjana, elaborates vividly how scholars from two institutions (Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society) collaborated for a decade to develop a new model of teaching science which created the conditions for a new kind of research and made the science students to appreciate the perspectives of social sciences and humanities. While analysing the issues of inter-disciplinarity, Niranjana argues that input from social sciences and humanities will allow the scientists to be better scientists as it may help them to conceptualise a problem in a different way. In the same vein, Achuthan presents a case study of an experimental postgraduate course on ‘Production of Knowledge in the natural and social sciences’, which was started at Indian Institute of Science to break the boundaries in history and methodology of natural science.
Moving beyond the metropolis, in Section 2, Sridhar critically reflected on the ‘method of science’ and showed how the standard view of science is far from the actual practice of science, and neutrality and objectivity of data is a misnomer. Similarly, Dhar (from mental health science) and Niranjana (cultural studies), while reflecting from their own disciplinary backgrounds, came to the conclusion that ‘cognition’ is beyond the mind–body divide as its understanding requires an integrated area of natural as well as human science enquiries. Chadha, in her experiment with the integration of science and social sciences, added a third dimension to the experiment that is the ‘critiquing of science’. Underlining her experience of delivering a workshop course to the undergraduate students of applied sciences, she took three critical axes—the definition of science, nature of science, and the science and society relationship—to explore the possibility of an integrated science education. While unpacking the varied meanings of science, she interrogated the rigid notion of the nature of science, scientific objectivity and the scientific methods. She suggested that there is no simple equation between the development of science and the development of a society. There is a need for using the unconventional materials such as films and theatre to engage the engineering/science students, to expand the domain of what is construed as valid pedagogical material in the classroom, particularly in the science classroom. However, using material from existing disciplinary cannons and expecting it to be comprehended by the other is a faulty expectation.
In her essay, Phalkey suggests that teaching the history of science and technology could be the first step to encourage the engineering students to think historically about their own place in the world of science and technology, and to find the meaning and relevance of their practices. Mulupuru and Bhadra in their essays experiment a ‘dialogue model’ to introduce the social science perspective into the study of ‘biological evolution’. Both of them, however, noticed that it is extremely difficult to structure a dialogue between the strangers who are not familiar with each other’s work, material or plans for the courses.
In Section 3, different scholars explain how the ‘ways of knowing, seeing and doing’ in sciences and social sciences could be integrated. They argue that exposing the science students to the social science methods such as ethnographic method, textual analysis, historical methods and the psychological method will help them to question the exclusivity of the link between objectivity and knowledge. For instance, Sinha illustrates how a scientific text, too, can be subjected to different interpretations and Vasudevan argues for historicising the scientific facts/events.
The overall message the book conveyed is that social sciences do have ‘a method’ and natural science texts are also ‘texts’ which could be open to methods of textual analysis and reading. The basic assumption of the editors is to show the ‘unity of methods’, an assumption that has been questioned since the days of positivism. In almost all essays, authors have argued that engineering and science students should be given exposure to basic concepts, theoretical perspectives and methods used in social sciences and humanities. But none of them have felt the need that students of social sciences and humanities also need to learn, or at least get familiarised with, new developments in different branches of science and technology. Besides this limitation, the book provides excellent reference materials for understanding the issues related to practical difficulty/problems in practicing interdisciplinarity in Indian context and how to bridge the gap between two cultures. This book must be read by all those who are concerned with the production and the application of scientific knowledge for their society.