Written by Patrick E. Horn, Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature

While recently designing a freshman composition course on “Writing in the Social Sciences” for the UNC Writing Program, I requested support from a graduate student colleague in the Department of Psychology. This decision required an additional time commitment up front, but that time was well spent: over the course of the semester my students were able to design and conduct original experiments on human subjects (in compliance with ethical research standards) in order to investigate “the psychology of reading.” Moreover, my colleague and I were able to bring the methodologies of both disciplines into the classroom. As a result, my students were able to achieve something that I had only imagined up to that point: they tested various hypotheses about personal factors and formal qualities that influence readers’ responses to literary texts.

“But wait,” you’re thinking. “I don’t know anyone in the department of [fill in the blank].” Actually, I didn’t know the individual who wound up serving as my Graduate Research Consultant until a professor put us in contact—at my request. But when we met to discuss the course, it became clear that we were interested in many similar research questions. What differed most were our methodologies—as well as the major scholars and sources that we draw upon in our work. I came away from our first meeting with pages of notes.

I have previously served as a GRC for a professor in my own department, and at least from my perspective, that collaboration also seemed helpful for students. I was able to present a guest lecture on an author whose life and work I had studied closely (F. Scott Fitzgerald), and my background as a writing tutor helped me advise several undergraduates on thesis statements and revision strategies for their final research papers. But these contributions mostly ran parallel to the professor’s. The content that I was able to provide was complementary to hers, and I believe the students benefited from it, but in a metacritical sense, I was adding to the course content rather than multiplying its potential.

In contrast, my “interdisciplinary GRC” was able to address entire fields of study that were relatively unknown to me. At times his contributions were general, such as discussing the importance of conducting studies with random samples of respondents. Other times he offered very specific sources and materials: a recent study on “experience-taking” by readers of literary narratives; a standard instrument used to measure certain attributes of test subjects. Perhaps the students would have been better off if he had taught the entire course, you’re thinking? But then they would have missed our sustained focus on close reading and analyzing the formal qualities of literary narratives, not to mention the editorial scalpel I applied to every paper they submitted. Actually, the most exciting aspect of the course was that it pushed at the disciplinary and methodological boundaries of both fields. To fully apprehend the psychology of reading, one needs to act simultaneously as a literary critic and a social scientist.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will confess that this type of course can be intimidating to teach. I was open with my students about the fact that we were moving into somewhat uncharted territory (at least for me) toward the end of the semester, as they conducted their experiments and analyzed the results. But as a result, they were able to design highly creative and thought-provoking projects, and we had the intellectually stimulating experience of speculating together about how to measure specific effects, or why certain experiments produced particular results.

For example, one group analyzed how (and to what extent) reading order influenced readers’ moods—particularly when they read a positive text before reading a negative text, or vice versa. As the group hypothesized, reading the negative text last did turn out to increase the test subjects’ negativity scores by a significant margin. But strangely enough, the subjects’ happiness (positivity) scores remained more or less constant. This led to some interesting follow-up questions during class discussions: is negativity easier to influence than positivity? Is there some pleasure in sadness, at least if it is experienced vicariously? Do readers prefer sad stories to happy ones? Tolstoy’s famous opening line from Anna Karenina came to mind: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Click here to see the full project:

Sample ENGL 105i Group Project

Could I have taught this course without a GRC from the psychology department? Certainly, but it would have lacked methodological rigor. For example, when the students stated their intention to measure mood effects, my colleague was able to supply them with an established mood survey and a “Big Five” personality survey to administer before the experiment—in order to ensure that the students were really measuring changeable effects, and not merely the personalities of the respondents. Likewise, he offered to enter the data into SPSS, a regression-based program for statistical analysis, and after crunching the numbers, he helped students understand technical concepts such as standard deviation and “p values.” Therefore, instead of analyzing their results through rudimentary tools and methods, the students were able to try to think like social scientists, particularly in retrospect, when they identified experimental design flaws and possibilities for future research.

Those of us who teach “Writing in the Disciplines” courses often encounter a similar problem: as writing instructors, many of us have academic backgrounds in the humanities, but our students need to learn how to write lab reports, or grant proposals, or survey questionnaires, or case studies. Sometimes we find ways to circumvent the missing content, with claims such as “I’m not a science teacher, but I can teach you how to write more effectively for science courses.” While these claims may be (partly) true, another approach is to combine our areas of expertise with those of a subject matter expert from another discipline. The collaborations that result may be exciting—and not only those between the sciences and the humanities. What about a course on writing history, or writing reviews of musical performances, or writing and producing original screenplays? Any of these potential collaborations might enable intriguing investigations while delivering very practical and tangible skill sets.

Most major universities tout interdisciplinary programs of research and study, but in practice, interdisciplinary work can be difficult to pursue in a meaningful way. Disciplinary methodologies vary widely, often for valid and important reasons. But combining the collective insights and conventions of one’s own field with those of a fellow scholar from “outside the walls” can enable new and innovative approaches to the curriculum of life, which is always interdisciplinary and rich in its “inexhaustible variety.”