First of all, the meaning of Disciplinary is a term used to describe types of knowledge, expertise, skills, people, projects, communities, problems, challenges, studies, inquiry, approaches, and research areas that are strongly associated with academic areas of study (academic disciplines) or areas of professional practice (profession). For example, the phenomenon of gravitation is strongly associated with academic discipline of physics, and so gravitation is considered to be part of the disciplinary knowledge of physics.
Disciplinary refers to knowledge associated with one academic discipline or profession. Common variations include:
1. Cross disciplinary
- Cross disciplinary refers to knowledge that explains aspects of one discipline in terms of another. Common examples of cross disciplinary approaches are studies of the physics of music or the politics of literature.
2. Interdisciplinary
- Interdisciplinary refers to new knowledge extensions that exist between or beyond existing academic disciplines or professions. The new knowledge may be claimed by members of none, one, both, or an emerging new academic discipline or profession.
An interdisciplinary community or project is made up of people from multiple disciplines and professions who are engaged in creating and applying new knowledge as they work together as equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. The key question is what new knowledge (of an academic discipline nature), which is outside the existing disciplines, is required to address the challenge. Aspects of the challenge cannot be addressed easily with existing distributed knowledge, and new knowledge becomes a primary subgoal of addressing the common challenge. The nature of the challenge, either its scale or complexity, requires that many people have interactional expertise to improve their efficiency working across multiple disciplines as well as within the new interdisciplinary area. An interdisciplinarary person is a person with degrees from one or more academic disciplines with additional interactional expertise in one or more additional academic disciplines, and new knowledge that is claimed by more than one discipline. Over time, interdisciplinary work can lead to an increase or a decrease in the number of academic disciplines.
3. Transdisciplinary
- Transdisciplinary refers to knowledge that exists in every individual, thus eliminating the need for discipline boundaries.
A transdisciplinary community or project is made up of transdisciplinary professionals, which is an ideal that can only be approached and not actually achieved in practice. To exist in today's society, a transdisciplinary professional would possess certification or degrees in all disciplines as well as experience in all professions. In essence, a truly transdisciplinary person contains all the distributed knowledge of the people in the community or project as their individual common knowledge. Furthermore, they exist within a community of people that share that knowledge. A transdisciplinary community is one in which common knowledge of individuals and the distributed knowledge of the collective are identical.
4. Qualitative Disciplinary
- Qualitative research is a field of inquiry in its own right. It cross cuts disciplines, fields, and subject matters. A complex, interconnected family of term qualitative research.
5. Ethnographic Disciplinary
- The ethnographic method is used across a range of different disciplines, primarily by anthropologists but also frequently by sociologists. Cultural studies, economics, social work, education, ethnomusicology, folklore, religious studies geography, history, linguistics, communication studies, performance studies, advertising, psychology, usability and criminology are other fields which have made use of ethnography.
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