Teaching for Synthesis at the London Interdisciplinary School

The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) is a British higher-education institution that opened in 2021, with a base in Whitechapel, London. It seeks to advance higher education through innovation in curriculum, with the creation of two new degrees: the Bachelor’s in Arts and Science (BASc) and Master’s in Arts and Science (MASc). While a traditional liberal arts degree might expose students to a wide range of fields of knowledge, a particularly unique part of degrees at LIS is an explicit focus on knowledge synthesis across different disciplines and methods, allowing us to understand and tackle complex problems. In this essay, we describe the founding of LIS and then briefly detail three distinct aspects of teaching for synthesis. In contrast to a “bottom up” approach—which relies on interdisciplinarity to result incidentally from disciplinary combinations—this technique is part of a series of coherent actions that synthesize knowledge broadly across different disciplines and methods. 

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Authors: Carl Gombrich and Amelia Peterson