Throughout the semester, our Reader and Text class has continued to come back to the importance of interdisciplinarity. Being aware of your world in an interdisciplinary sense means being able to connect what you are seeing, learning, or doing to fields that might not seem immediately relevant. In class on November 2, we were asked to look for archives around campus and, as a class, discuss what such archives might mean. People came back and talked about the science building, art building, bars off campus, and many other locations that have their own unique histories. Being able to connect locations that seem so different and are utilized very differently (the IB is definitely used differently from the ISC) to an English class discussion made me think about what it means to study something in a way that is interdisciplinary. Having the ability to pay attention to the way the world is interconnected helps me to have a better understanding of what each of these locations mean – not only to me, but what they could mean to others. The archives I found through sculptures in Brodie that I hadn’t noticed before, or the map I found in the ISC, forced me to think about how aware I am of my surroundings. I now realize that even though I’m not a science or art major, I can still appreciate different aspects of the places chemistry and art history majors call home.
English Majors Practising Criticism