Social Sciences, Humanities and interdisciplinarity for non-humanities majors

Shcherbenok, Andrey Valeryevich
PhD (SPBU), PhD (UC Berkeley), Professor, Director, School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen, Director of Undergraduate Programs, SKOLKOVO School of Management University of Tyumen, SKOLKOVO School of Management, Tyumen/Moscow, Russia
andrey_shcherbenok@skolkovo.ru


Abstract
in Russian university tradition of studying natural sciences and engineering social sciences and the humanities are usually regarded as components of a rather optional general education. Oftentimes, the general education curriculum simply follows state educational standards and the tradition of teaching these courses in a given university. The question of how general education courses interact with major courses and with each other is not even raised. If the university does pay attention to general education, its relevance is reduced to the development of soft skills which, for example, an engineer needs to effectively communicate on professional topics.
The paper will present alternative approaches to humanities and social sciences in university education and will pose a question of how interdisciplinary (rather than multidisciplinary) education is possible on a BA level.

Keywords: humanities, social sciences, interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, core curriculum, electives, general education