Interdisciplinary Problem Solving — Enriching Social Work Doctoral Education
Social Work Today
By Stephen C. Burke, PhD, and Lois King Draina, PhD
Vol. 4 No. 2 p. 18

Shoulder to shoulder, a team of doctoral students—comprised of a school principal, a higher education administrator, a healthcare clinician, a high school teacher, and a social worker—examine the implications that their planning may hold for students and their families. For their class project, the team members decided to devise a definition of poverty that would provide a tighter “fit” with the human realities that they encounter daily in their respective work settings.

Roche et al. (1999) state that an interdisciplinary approach to education can lead to collaborative and more enriching learning experiences for those in student and instructor roles.

Rather than attempting to live up to the Middle Ages myth of the independent scholar—upon which many doctoral programs today still pattern their program—an interdisciplinary problem-solving approach to doctoral education can prepare social work students to meet the challenges of an increasingly complex and interdependent world.

Interdisciplinary Tradition
As a profession, social work has never been shy in terms of its willingness to borrow and adapt models and theory from other disciplines. Whether adopting the medical model, evolving modern-day systems theory from 19th century physics, or developing a strengths-based perspective from resiliency work anchored in psychology, social work has modeled how a profession can grow and thrive by recognizing and respecting the potential for intellectual growth of other disciplines and professions.

The Council on Social Work Education’s (2001) accreditation standards mandate that BSW and MSW programs “apply knowledge of bio-psycho-social variables” and that a “liberal arts perspective” must form the basis for foundation curriculum. In charging the undergraduate and graduate programs thusly, the council has at least opened the door for the potential of interdisciplinary curricula to inform BSW and MSW education. At the doctoral level of education, however, no such mandates for interdisciplinary content exist. The architecture of doctoral courses is beholden to the imagination and creativity of those involved in designing a given curriculum.

Interdisciplinary Scholarship
Welcome to the Social and Economic Dimensions of Human Development course, one of four core courses in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Human Development created by Marywood University.

The Doctoral Program defines interdisciplinary as “a knowledge view and curriculum approach that consciously applies methodology and language from more than one discipline to examine a central theme or issue” (Marywood University, 2002). Given the interdisciplinary focus of the doctoral program, the core courses examine the influences and confluences of moral, physiological, psychological, spiritual, social, and economic factors on human development.

Within that interdisciplinary theme, the Social and Economic Dimensions of Human Development course encourages the development of future community leaders/change agents.

Through the interplay of theoretical content, integrative in-class exercises, and a group problem-solving model, students’ views of issues and subsequent intervention strategies become more sophisticated as the boundaries between disciplines blur.

Conversely, the strengths and values of traditional professions such as social work, nursing, education, and psychology ultimately enrich the world view and enhance the problem-solving repertoire of the students.

While “thinking out of the box” and “nontechnical, creative problem solving” are phrases that have lost their original cachet, students in this course use these terms to describe their efforts to push themselves and the instructors to open profession/discipline-based boundaries to alternative ways of framing issues and, ultimately, approaches to problem solving.

Creating Connections
The course assignments, consisting of an interdisciplinary team problem-solving project and a series of integrative papers, are geared toward assisting students to simultaneously create connections between the professions represented on their team, thus blurring the boundaries between the knowledge foundations of the disciplines represented on the team.

The team problem-solving project serves a number of purposes: 1) the assignment provides team members with a venue in which their problem-solving and leadership skills are tested against a project with real deadlines and expectations around creative resolution; 2) the assignment provides an opportunity for students to reframe the issue under study and subsequently the recommendation for resolution; 3) the assignment allows each student to identify strengths relative to the knowledge and value bases of the other professions represented on the team; and 4) the students’ interpersonal skills are tested as the team’s group dynamics weigh in as a factor relative to issue resolution.

Each team is responsible for the presentation of its project to class colleagues, as well as the production of a paper of publishable quality to be submitted to a professional journal. The following parameters guide the presentation and paper development, as well as the process by which the students conduct team business: teams must reach consensus on their topic of study; each team member is responsible for identifying how his or her profession/discipline has traditionally viewed or framed the issue under study and how that frame is reflected in current policy; each team member must identify profession- and/or discipline-based barriers that limit creative resolutions to the topic under study; and team members are asked to identify strengths of their profession that could assist in problem resolution (Course Syllabus: Social and Economic Dimensions of Human Development, Fall 2003).

Additionally, the paper and presentation must show: 1) the evolution of the interdisciplinary process/framework decided upon by the team; 2) the discovery of the different ways/combinations that the team found to problem solve across professions; and 3) ways that the identified strengths of the professions/disciplines add to the knowledge base of the professions represented on the team.

Redefining Poverty
With the interdisciplinary team whose task it was to reconceptualize the definition of poverty, the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach to doctoral social work education becomes apparent as the team members started discussions by addressing the following questions:
1. How is the prevailing concept of poverty used to determine who should have access to health, education, and economic systems?
2. If people in need are deemed ineligible for access to these systems, how might a reconceptualization of poverty address their needs? (Glushefski et al., 2003)

From the writings of Blumer (1969), the team was cognizant of the cultural weight attached to the concept of poverty and poverty thresholds. The systems’ influences discussed by Anderson, Carter, and Lowe (1999) were evident on many fronts, including the acknowledgement by the group of the breakdown of profession/discipline barriers, thus assisting the team to evolve into a functioning, task-centered group; and the recognition by the team that altering perceptions alters the interactions within/between sociocultural systems—a key to reframing.

In terms of team process, each team member initially brought examples of static and conflicting poverty thresholds/guidelines that they dealt with in their professional lives. Out of these discussions, subcategories of poverty evolved that more accurately described the conditions team members were seeing in the lives of their students, clients, and patients: emotional poverty, ethical poverty, social poverty, and a poverty of choice.

Eventually, the team consensus evolved to the point where it was recognized that “poverty,” with its attendant policy and stigma, was actually a limiting factor to their reframing objective. An alternate view was needed that would more fully capture their professional experiences in the classroom where “low-income students are enrolled in less demanding courses that do not prepare them for college,” in health clinics where “working families without access to adequate health care (are) experiencing low-birth weight outcomes,” and in service agencies that work with “children who turn to gangs as surrogate families to which they can feel accepted”(Glushefski et al., 2002).

With Fresh Eyes
The team started to view the issues affecting their students, clients, and families through the lens of impoverishment rather than poverty. Reframing the issue to one of impoverishment suggests societal responses that tend to be more structural and comprehensive in nature—compared with a response pattern of viewing the issue resolution as one of income disparity and the resolution being an incremental adjustment of the poverty/eligibility standards. Important as income is to family functioning, basic restructuring of societal resources, institutions, and values must occur if issues are to be addressed in their totality.

The integrative papers’ assignment is designed to provide students with an opportunity to take risks in finding fresh connections between concepts or ideas that have been introduced in this course and preceding doctoral courses. In the four integrative papers required, students are expected to take seemingly disparate concepts or ideas and, given great liberty by the instructors, attempt to make connections between them or build off of them to go into other areas of interest.

Each of the papers is three pages in length, so students must be parsimonious and focused in their theme development. It is enlightening for both the students and instructors when connections are made between Kaku’s (1997) vision of the dimensions of future scientific revolutions and Vygotsky’s (Cole, 1978) ideas on the effects of culture on language development.

Students are free to select different themes for each of the papers, or they may elect to build on their initial ideas by adding texture and depth via the introduction of concepts/connections in succeeding papers. Either option supports the course objective of students being able to deal effectively as change agents with the many sociocultural systems that impact their professional lives (Course Syllabus: Social and Economic Dimensions of Human Development, Fall 2003).

— Stephen C. Burke, PhD, is an associate professor at Marywood University and BSW program director.
— Lois King Draina, PhD, is an associate professor at Marywood University and dean, College of Education and Human Development.

References
Anderson, R. E., Carter, I. E., & Lowe, G. R. (1999). Human behavior in the social environment: A social systems approach. New York: A. de Gruyter.
Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Cole, M. (Ed.). (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Council on Social Work Education. (2001). Educational policy and accreditation standards. Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education.
Glushefski, J. B., Quinn, T., Radle, C. A., Roberts, C., & Zombro, N. (2002). Poverty as a determinant of eligibility for access to systems that offer assistance. Paper submitted as part of Social and Economic Dimensions of Human Behavior course.
Kaku, M. (1997). Visions. New York: Doubleday.
Marywood University. (2002). The interdisciplinary doctoral program in human development. [Brochure]. Scranton, PA: Author.
Roche, S. E., Dewees, M., Trailwater, R., Alexander, S., Cuddy, C., & Handy, M. (1999). Contesting boundaries in social work education: A liberatory approach to cooperative learning and teaching. Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education.
Syron, E. (2003). Reaction paper #4: Presentations. Paper presented as part of Social and Economic Dimensions of Human Development course.