Self-contained curricula incorporate their disciplinary combining within their own courses. On the SFSU campus programs like Black Studies, Humanities, Management, and Social Work Education take this approach. Boundary-crossing programs on the other hand, utilize a different strategy. They expect their students to take most of their coursework from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary programs. Liberal Studies is probably the best example of this approach.
Students have the challenge of making sense of a variety of frameworks.
Conclusions Some programs, such as Interdisciplinary Social Science, offer a series of core courses which are intended to help students navigate the disciplinary maze. First, identifying the basic disciplines can be done, but not without employing some degree of conceptual and historical arbitrariness. Second, interdisciplinary programs then become a huge residual category with many manifestations. The term inter disciplinarity then requires further differentiation. Third, multidisciplinarity is only one type, and the weakest one at that, if one believes that a significant degree of permeability and integration across disciplinary boundaries is educationally desirable.