Interdisciplinary Education and Historical Thinking

This paper describes history and motivations of the Centre for Society, Technology and Values (CSTV), an interdisciplinary undergraduate-focused academic unit at the University of Waterloo embedded in the Faculty of Engineering. CSTV provides a Science and Technology Studies (STS)-like program and set of courses in critical thinking about technology, primarily to engineering undergraduates. It offers many interdisciplinary opportunities to students, from the course content and methods, to the opportunity for many different students to work together. The paper also describes a specific STV course that explicitly crosses disciplinary boundaries by emphasizing the historical thinking framework. These methods and tools are drawn from historiography, but allow students from any program to better analyze many common claims about technology and society in the past, present and future. Across all STV and in this specific one, by offering engineering students an opportunity to better understand other disciplines, they can better understand their own.