The cynic in me agrees with Ken . Personally, I think it is an excellent idea, although they should be given $1 in coin so that they can call for an extraction if necessary (and get an F on the exercise ).
If we step back from this for a moment, what is "out of the box" thinking? What is "the box"? And, assuming that people do start thinking outside of it, how will they be able to communicate to those still held in the boxes thrall?
It strikes me that the idea of an MA is not so much about out of the box thinking as it is about thinking in another (disciplinary) box. Granted, you can cover more ground with two boxes than with one, but that is still limited.
If we (partially) drop the metaphor, what we are really talking about is several different issues: disciplinarity (1 box), interdisciplinarity (2+boxes), transdisciplinarity ("Boxes? Don't need no stinkin' boxes!"), organizational culture and organizational communications. This is the stuff I teach every Fall term, so it's near and dear to my heart.
From what I have seen, there is a fairly standard progression in people's thinking going from disciplinarity, through interdisciplinarity towards transdisciplinarity. It is as much a mental and psychological shift as one of perceptions. For example, most people operating solely in a single discipline tend towards seeing all problems with that discipline's lens: one of those "when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" situations. On occassion, this can lead to extremely rigid thinking where, when the boundaries of that discipline have been reached, people can (and do) suffer mental and emotional breakdowns ("Facts? Don't bother me with facts!").
People who think in interdisciplinary terms tend to be better at dealing with problems at the boundary zone of one discipline, mainly because they can shift to another as necessary. This can often bring them into conflict with people who only think in a single discipline for a whole slew of reasons. This potential for conflict is enhanced if the additional disciplines are radically different from the organizational primary discipline - say, for a silly example, performance art and accounting. This is where we start getting into organizational culture and communications.
Many larger organizations formally recognize different disciplinary thinking and place it in a "box of boxes" (i.e. the formal organizational culture, aka Weberian bureaucratic organizational hierarchies). Part and parcel with this formal organization is a formalization of both the lines and genres of communications between the boxes (e.g. "this is a job for the CA folks"). Generally, this sort of kludge can work fairly well, but it does lead to disciplinary stereotyping which may be problematic if the operational environment changes.
Transdisciplinarity is a threat to the "box of boxes" since its basis is that one can transcend disciplines into a single, broader stance (thereby attacking identities constructed around both those single disciplines as well as the necessity for a bureaucratic organization). Again, many formal organizational cultures do recognize this type of thinking, but they either place it at the apex of the hierarchy or one step down and to the side (as an example, the discipline of "management" is an attempt to formalize, in a disciplinary format, some form of transdisciplinarity).
If we bring all of this back to the specific focuse, SF education at the O3 level, there are several interesting points. First, SF is in and of itself a stereotyped, bureucratic "box" for a particular series of interdisciplinary actions - "out of the [mainstream] box" thinking is an organizational culture requirement. Second, and as a modification of the first point, while SF "thinking" is required to be "out of the box", there is a question of what other boxes are acceptable: how about poetry? Stand-up comedy? Improvizational acting? Cordon Bleu cooking? Baroque singing (yeah, you knew I had to get that in !)?
I think I'm going to leave it here and see what people think.
Cheers,
Marc
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