Diversity research and scholarship has evolved over the past several decades and is now reaching a critical juncture. While the scholarship on diversity and inclusion has advanced within various disciplines and subdisciplines, there have been limited conversations and collaborations across distinct areas of research. Theories, paradigms, research models and methodologies have evolved but continue to remain locked within specific area, disciplines, or theoretical canons. This collaborative edited volume examines diversity across disciplines in higher education. Our book brings together contributions from the arts, sciences, and professional fields. In order to advance diversity and inclusion across campuses, multiple disciplinary perspectives need to be acknowledged and considered broadly. The current higher education climate necessitates multicultural and interdisciplinary collaboration. Global partnerships and technological advances require faculty, administrators, and graduate students to reach beyond their disciplinary focus to achieve successful programs and research projects. We need to become more familiar discussing diversity across disciplines. Our book investigates diversity across disciplines with attention to people, process, policies, and paradigms. The four thematic categories of people, process, policies, and paradigms describe the multidisciplinary nature of diversity and topics relevant to faculty, administrators, and students in higher education. The framework provides a structure to understand the ways in which people are impacted by diversity and the complicated process of engaging with diversity in a variety of contexts. Policies draw attention to the dynamic nature of diversity across disciplines and paradigms presents models of diversity in research and education.

Calls for closer connections among disciplines can be heard throughout the world of scholarly research, from major universities to the National Institutes of Health. In Defense of Disciplines presents a fresh and daring analysis of the argument surrounding interdisciplinarity. Challenging the belief that blurring the boundaries between traditional academic fields promotes more integrated research and effective teaching, Jerry Jacobs contends that the promise of interdisciplinarity is illusory and that critiques of established disciplines are often overstated and misplaced. Drawing on diverse sources of data, Jacobs offers a new theory of liberal arts disciplines such as biology, economics, and history that identifies the organizational sources of their dynamism and breadth. Illustrating his thesis with a wide range of case studies including the diffusion of ideas between fields, the creation of interdisciplinary scholarly journals, and the rise of new fields that spin off from existing ones, Jacobs turns many of the criticisms of disciplines on their heads to mount a powerful defense of the enduring value of liberal arts disciplines. This will become one of the anchors of the case against interdisciplinarity for years to come.

The National Science Foundation funded a synthesis study on the status, contributions, and future direction of discipline-based education research (DBER) in physics, biological sciences, geosciences, and chemistry. DBER combines knowledge of teaching and learning with deep knowledge of discipline-specific science content. It describes the discipline-specific difficulties learners face and the specialized intellectual and instructional resources that can facilitate student understanding. Discipline-Based Education Research is based on a 30-month study built on two workshops held in 2008 to explore evidence on promising practices in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. This book asks questions that are essential to advancing DBER and broadening its impact on undergraduate science teaching and learning. The book provides empirical research on undergraduate teaching and learning in the sciences, explores the extent to which this research currently influences undergraduate instruction, and identifies the intellectual and material resources required to further develop DBER. Discipline-Based Education Research provides guidance for future DBER research. In addition, the findings and recommendations of this report may invite, if not assist, post-secondary institutions to increase interest and research activity in DBER and improve its quality and usefulness across all natural science disciples, as well as guide instruction and assessment across natural science courses to improve student learning. The book brings greater focus to issues of student attrition in the natural sciences that are related to the quality of instruction. Discipline-Based Education Research will be of interest to educators, policy makers, researchers, scholars, decision makers in universities, government agencies, curriculum developers, research sponsors, and education advocacy groups.

"Bringing together scholarship and pedagogy from a multiple of perspectives and disciplines to provide a broader and more complex understanding of information literacy and suggests ways that teaching and library faculty can work together to respond to the rapidly changing and dynamic information landscape"--Provided by publisher.

Research within the Disciplines is designed to help reference librarians – and students studying to become librarians – gain that deeper understanding of disciplinary differences that allows them to comfortably solve information needs rather than merely responding to questions, and practical knowledge about how to work with researchers in a library setting. The book has three chapters that cover the disciplines at the broadest level – humanities, social sciences, and sciences, plus supplemental chapters that focus on associated disciplines (research in history, business, and engineering, research using government sources) and across disciplines (interdisciplinary and critical information literacy). For the second edition of Research within the Disciplines, several chapters have been added that together give a broader and deeper overview of research across all subject areas: research practices of creative and performing artists and of clinical scientists, research in international documents, research strategies for foreign language materials, and visual literacy across the disciplines. Major shifts in technology have been accounted for that have changed how we do research and have expanded the range of resources available to researchers in all disciplines. All of the chapters have been rewritten or heavily revised; this is much more a new book than a new edition.

Is there a ‘crisis’ in the disciplines of education? In this book, leading scholars explore how the changing epistemological and political debates of the last 20 years have resulted in the progressive demise of the disciplines in relation to the study of education. Finally the book asks whether the disciplines have a place in education in the 21st century.