A general education mess in the making
Last week, our department hosted “Patok na Patok,” a national conference on pop culture and media studies. The event drew researchers from across the country, whose work spanned anything that had made headlines, was talked about, and shaped how we understood an issue, our culture, and ourselves.
There were studies on people’s perceptions of memes, especially during elections; on how gaming or online videos could lend insight into family dynamics; the constructs of nationhood, identity, and governance in movies, television series, even music.
I was a moderator for some of the sessions, and I interacted with professionals who had come to learn about trends in research, as well as students who were still wrestling with methods and theory. As is usual with any communication research conference, there were no academic silos, turfing, or one field being privileged over another.
Communication, after all, is an interdisciplinary social science: it integrates theories from psychology, sociology, the humanities, even mathematics.
The same is true for my subfield, science and risk communication. While most people reduce it to “science for the lay public,” real science and risk communication means working with the varying paradigms of the social sciences and where they meet the bench sciences.
I can’t just say, “I will put scientific information in a communication project” and then call it science communication. That reduces the rich field of communication to being the handmaiden of science. It assumes that communication is an ad hoc activity, a field to be ignored when “rigor” is discussed, a mere act of transferring information from a more “important” field.
It’s easy to get communication wrong when it’s perceived as a mere channel. It’s even easier to get interdisciplinary work wrong when fields are pushed together and called “integrated.” This was so apparent last weekend, when the draft proposal for the new general education (GE) curriculum came out, courtesy of the Commission on Higher Education.
The new GEs were focused on understanding trends, being ready for the workplace, and on communication as presentation and performance. Professors who would teach such courses required an “interdisciplinary orientation,” so that they could “contextualize content across disciplines.”
Many internet posts called the proposal empty. Others speculated that it would be unevenly implemented: autonomous universities would continue to deliver deep dives into the humanities and social sciences, while other schools would comply with a bare minimum—and yet everyone would still be labeled critical thinkers.
Some saw it as a shift in educational philosophy: universities were now factories to churn out workers responsive to trends, rather than thinkers whose identities were strongly formed regardless of profession or workplace.
The draft proposal itself mentions how the proposed GE subjects are interdisciplinary. Closer scrutiny of the requirements for professors betrays a poor understanding of the purpose of interdisciplinary work: it’s not merely to transfer information, as though all facts were objective and all people were mere vessels for knowledge; and it’s not merely to ensure “measurable outcomes,” which many curricula today like to invoke in the name of metrics and so-called objectivity.
Interdisciplinarity means seamlessly integrating methods, concepts, and insights from two or more fields that are respected as equals in their contribution, recognizing common philosophical ground, and using all of this to solve a complex problem.
A look at the GE courses themselves shows some fields being implicitly defined as servants to another: communication as conveying information, social science as a way to examine trends, data literacy as a tool for a knowledge-driven society, history as dates rather than depth of citizenship.
This is merely using one field to service another, with no guarantee that students understand and embody the bases of the fields being put together.
We’re already dealing with the aftermath of interdisciplinarity driven by metrics rather than a deep understanding of disparate fields. Post-K-12, the students coming through our university struggle to express themselves, are so afraid of criticism, and have built their lives on their grades so that they cannot accept anything less than perfect scores lest their identities fall apart.
I’ve heard it in so many forms just this semester: ”I was so focused on my high school grades, and I don’t think I learned anything. We were just taking notes in class because we had to, but I remember nothing. I’m so tired.”
This new draft curriculum will only make this burnout worse. It forces a shallow understanding of one field to meet the shallow understanding of another, and dares to call it interdisciplinary. It’s like building a house with many floors and annexes, but with toothpicks and pebbles as foundation—and then asking why everything is a mess, and why everything is falling apart.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
