In your mid-term assignment, you will be crafting a defense of an interdisciplinary approach regarding a research question that interests you. Imagine that you are working on a specific research question in your field (perhaps you already have a suitable project in mind based upon your coursework). In a well-written essay of at least 10 pages, you will describe the disciplines you will employ to address this question and you will explain how you’ll integrate these disciplines in your project.
In order to complete this assignment, you will find primary texts in your areas of study (you need to draw from at least two areas)–texts like Introduction to Philosophy, The Basics of Engineering, etc.–and you will utilize Repko’s methodology of describing a disciplinary perspective to clearly specify your understanding of the fields. In addition to using those primary texts and the Repko text, you will need to refer to deeper texts in your field to demonstrate your rich understanding of how these fields work.
After describing the disciplines you utilize in terms of the disciplinary perspectives method (phenomena, method, concepts, etc.), you will go on to describe how your project will integrate the insights from each of these disciplines to produce new knowledge. This will take some imagination, as you can’t possibly know where a research question will take you.
To give you a better idea of what I’m looking for, I’ve provided two samples below. The first sample is a very rough version of this assignment that I created in the process of developing this final project (Links to an external site.),