Peer review of an reflection essay

A Reflection on Interdisciplinary Advanced Writing

As my first online class, Interdisciplinary Advanced Writing was a unique experience right off the bat. From a cursory glance, I knew I would be tasked with taking on projects that incorporated people from different disciplines, but what that really entailed and what interdisciplinary truly meant is something I would learn over the course of the next few weeks. As a business student, working in teams is critical and a highly prized skillset. Working in finance in particular, not only is team work critical to success, but being able to share information across disciplines is a major part of work in accounting for instance, where reports are given (and need to be interpreted) by a variety of teams that often have no finance background. Yet even though I thought I knew so much about my field and my discipline, I found over the course of the class that there was a still a lot to learn on a fundamental level about my community as a whole and how my writing reflected my disciplines common beliefs and practices. Through a brief analysis of past projects, I hope to reflect upon and explain the value that the course provided.

For our first project, we were tasked with fulfilling Learning Goal 2, or understanding better how writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and situation worked in our disciplines. This was accomplished by assessing your discipline, how it operated and how you related to it, then analyzing its unique genres and mediums, and finally analyzing a website central our disciplines. While the first and last part of the assignment seemed fairly routine, it was the assessment of my disciplines mediums and genres that really stood out to me. It dawned on me that I had never really taken the time to closely look at how my discipline communicated information. Being engrossed in the community every day, I had taken to thinking that was just how the world worked. The project, and the peer reviews, allowed me to really see not only how other disciplines operated, but how mine fit in to the framework of greater interdisciplinary operation.

Our second project tasked us with working with a partner from another discipline and performing a literature review of a shared topic. More importantly it tasked us with exploring and representing our experiences, perspectives, and ideas in conversation with others, or Learning Goal 7 (among other learning goals, but I took this to be the most important). It was a unique opportunity to not only work with a peer to perform a review of relevant literature of about a topic, but also take a closer look at how different disciplines address problems. I found the most value was to be had in seeing the differences in writing style and how information was presented by the two of us. Reconciling conventional disciplinary norms was a key part of the paper though it seemed like it wasn’t highlighted as much in the project description. Overall, the project fulfilled its objective and the learning goal was readily apparent in the undertaking.

The last project tasked us with doing research and proposing a solution to a problem faced by both our and a peer’s discipline. For this project, my partner and I chose to write about Big Data and how the issue of security could be solved through advanced mathematical processes and information regulation. Once again, Learning Goal 7 was more than adequately fulfilled in completing the project. Taking a shared issue and analyzing how our unique disciplines assess the situation, propose solutions, and then manage risk was an interesting undertaking. While my discipline generally allows more room for working freehand and adjusting on the fly, it was interesting seeing how another discipline may take a more structured approach. And though the genres and mediums we used to gather information and perform research were the same, they were fundamentally different in the viewpoints they provided. The project provided an opportunity to move past the conventional standards of my discipline and branch out my thinking to include what would otherwise be considered an outside the box approach to solving a problem.

Overall, the stress of “interdisciplinary” in Interdisciplinary Advanced Writing was something that I was happy I worked towards. The clearly stated learning goals helped tunnel my approach enough that a massively open ended project like Project 3 seemed feasible even when considering we’d have to reconcile two sometimes incredibly different approaches to problem solving. Though I didn’t talk about it at any length, a lot of value from the course was provided by the peer review process as well. Again, seeing how peers from different disciplines reacted to my writing that was framed within the context of my own discipline allowed me to reflect on how my discipline is perceived, and hopefully my future writing will reflect the knowledge that different disciplines write in different ways and seek to reconcile some of those differences.