A new education paradigm at the London Interdisciplinary School

Today, we are joined by Carl Gombrich, co-founder and Academic Lead at the London Interdisciplinary School, to discuss their innovative approach to education that blends interdisciplinary learning, real-world problem-solving, and critical engagement with technology.

Stay tuned and explore the evolving concept of expertise in the digital age, the importance of media literacy, and the challenge of breaking away from academia’s self-replicating tendencies.

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Transcript

Madeline Arkins:

I’m very glad to have the pleasure of speaking with Carl Gombrich on this very topic. Carl is Co-founder, Dean, and Academic Lead of the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS), with a background spanning mathematics, physics, philosophy, and professional opera performance.

Previously a teaching fellow at University College London, he spearheaded the development and launch of the UK’s first Bachelor’s in Arts and Sciences degree. His expertise has earned him a place in the British Academy Working Group on Interdisciplinarity, and he’s also a core panel member at the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders.

Carl, thanks for joining us today.

Carl Gombrich:

Hi Madeline, thank you very much for that kind introduction. Very nice to be here.

Madeline Arkins:

Great, so let’s get into it. Carl, you had quite a diverse career path from mathematics and physics to philosophy and opera singing, and I’m interested, as I’m sure everyone else is, in how this is very eclectic background maybe influenced your views on education and indeed how your background led you to your current role at the London Interdisciplinary School.

Carl Gombrich:

Yeah, thanks Madeline. So I’m getting on a little bit now, this story can take a long time and because I’m an opera singer and I have a bass voice, sometimes people snooze off like it’s granddad talking, so if I say too much just intervene.

But basically, it was quite interesting because I was doing all these different things all my life and struggled to fit in any one place or another. But when I then got to UCL, the great university in London, and had worked on their foundation courses, I became kind of known as a guy who had all these different skill sets and knowledge sets. And then, when they wanted to set up the first Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in the UK I was a weirdly natural go-to as I wasn’t in the academic mainstream.

It was wonderful for me because, suddenly, all these parts of my life that had been rather disparate and not joined together came together. It was also just around 2010, when people were seeing the impact of Web 2. 0. There’s a lot of talk about future skills and the future of work and what graduates were going to need. I wasn’t young then, I was in my early forties, but I felt like I was on the crest of quite a young wave, and I was a bit older, so I experienced that shift, and I was able to lead in it.

That kind of made my career. I had a wonderful time at UCL setting up the degree for eight and a half years in a design, set-up, launch, and establishing that program, and learned so much about interdisciplinary education, about what really can work, what gives fantastic graduate outcomes, what the challenges are in major established institution.

The benefits of the pitfalls, the sorts of students that can attract. So that was a great experience for me. And all those disparate parts of my life, my learning came together in that productive way.

Madeline Arkins:

That’s nice, it’s rare that there is a role or a career that is such a nice marriage of everything else you’ve done before. So happy to hear that. For the uninitiated, because the London Interdisciplinary School began in 2019, if I’m not mistaken, what is the school’s ethos, its MO? How does it maybe walk the walk in terms of helping create such well rounded graduates?

Carl Gombrich:

Our curriculum is as simple as it is radical: We don’t have any departments, we just teach through real-world problems and methods to tackle those problems.

It really is simple, but it’s so different to the thinking that you have to learn subject by subject or discipline by discipline to get what people might call rigor or relevance.

It’s so different that people sometimes struggle to understand what we do. And I guess that’s okay. We want to be different, that’s the point of being the first university since Warwick in the UK, 40 plus years ago, to get our own degree awarding powers at our inception. We want to be different, but we constantly have to kind of explain this and tell the story.

So, these real world problems are things like inequality, sustainability, climate change, AI and ethics and so on, that’s like the jam on the sandwich, if you like, and the bread on either side are these methods. And that’s where students get a lot of rigor and a lot of discipline, they have to learn data science, quantitative modeling, how to make a great video, ethnography techniques, survey design, focus group, design and running, all those things that go through three years.

And we think we have now got a great range of those kinds of methods. You might call them skills or research methods, doesn’t really matter, depends which audience you’re talking to, really. But a range of things they can actually do, which then allow them to tackle many of the great complex,

Madeline Arkins:

I think we lost you, Carl, just at the end there.

Carl Gombrich:

Sorry. I’m not, where did you lose me?

Madeline Arkins:

You were talking about having the research methods as a foundation to then tackle these problems in all those areas.

Carl Gombrich:

I, yes, that’s right. So we got our first graduating ceremony this Friday, and it’s fantastic to see the capstones that these students have produced and so on.

The very notion of roundedness is a difficult thing for an 18-year-old to see themselves in. We have this legacy of thinking “I’m either going to be a biochemist”, or “I’m going to be an economist”, or “I’m going to be someone who does English literature”, which is so far divorced from the reality of most working lives now, post 23-year old.

When you say you’ll have a whole bunch of tools, which will enable you to tackle many – in fact, the majority of the real world problems you’ll meet in the workplace -, that’s still a jump for a young student to see themselves in that kind of image.

That has been our challenge: Selling, if you like, what we do, and we’re still wrestling with whether we can really say “Look, this is about a kind of a very wide set of skills which you’ll use to focus on various different problems”, or whether we now need to think a little bit more like clusters and concentration. Should we say “you’ll focus mostly on poverty and inequality”, or “mostly on migration and geopolitics”. I want to resist that, because I know the data out there, and I know that once you go down that route, you box yourself, and also all the jobs you’re going to do don’t really care whether you start poverty.

The job you are doing now, you could have done at any number of degrees to do what you are doing, and do it really well, and that applies to whether you are a product manager, a program manager, a business analyst, all the things that actual graduates do. Doesn’t really matter what particular discipline they study at university.

So I’d rather keep it rounded, to use that word, and rigorous but general. But there is a perception challenge there, that students find it difficult to imagine where this is going to lead after the program.

Madeline Arkins:

Yeah, I think out of so many things, that kind of cultural mindshift is among the hardest to tackle. You can put all the structures in there, but if people still perceive you – and I’m biased in my own way because I have an English literature background and then pivoted to sociology – as almost like a jack of all trades, master of none, rather than this kind of rounded individual who was adaptable to so many different roles. And as you say, in a way, that the job market doesn’t predestine you into one direction from the get go.

Carl Gombrich:

There’s a whole literature now that’s out there about this, about the return of generalism, the return of polymathy. And I’m very convinced by a lot of that literature that this is an age, and when we go on to AI, maybe we’ll discuss AI again today, what that’s doing for what education needs to do and that people seem to be terrified by that concept. I don’t know why, but they really struggle with this as a possible turn of the wheel.

We’ve had polymathy before, in the Renaissance. That’s why we have the term Renaissance man, or person, that was normal. So why do we think it’s impossible to be that way?

It’s clearly not impossible. And of course, we had the great Arab flourishing in the 10th century, 11th century Baghdad. So there are many periods in history where, for whatever reason, there’s a kind of an upsurge in communications, for example, or an upsurge in the sort of novelty of what’s going on in the environment where you need these kind of polymathic and generalist skills.

But we haven’t been that way from the industrial revolution right through the 20th century. And people find it very difficult to conceive that we could be entering a new space where that is in fact needed in the norm. But there are all sorts of writers out there. There are big-shot entrepreneurs saying this, there are people documenting their own careers.

So many of us have now had diverse and multiple careers. And the education doesn’t really reflect that, at least not in the Anglosphere. It’s very stuck in the late 19th, early 20th century way of thinking about education.

Madeline Arkins:

I’m inclined to agree with you. Going back to what you said about the digital age, AI, how that is changing the landscape continually, the challenges that you have encountered in implementing something like this, may be not even necessarily related to your work at LIS, but also in the building of that Bachelors in Arts and Sciences.

What kind of challenges do you come across when you are trying to implement this kind of change in higher education?

Carl Gombrich:

There are two very different challenges, really. One is trying this very new thing in a very old established institution where the challenge was more the kind of bureaucratic structure and getting people from one department to teach on our degree, having our students go to all the different faculties at UCL. That was very formal the challenge, but the intellectual challenge wasn’t too difficult. You said in some ways, there was enough buy-in from some really big hitters, big academics to make it work. When you start a new university, there are lots of other different sorts of challenges.

There’s the whole concept of being a new university, why would you go to one? And then there are these challenges I say about designing completely new curriculum and how that’s perceived, how you convince people it’s going to be rigorous. I haven’t had the problem with academics here because we recruited the faculty, right?

So these are people who want something different. They are all very interdisciplinary in their background. They enjoy the kind of generative creativeness that gives to the whole place. They typically have multiple disciplinary backgrounds factor here, they will start in humanities, maybe like English like you, maybe they do a master’s in social science and then a PhD is something pretty hardcore quantitative with some data collection and analysis, or they go exactly the other way around.

So that’s been really fun and really not a problem. But the problems here are what it means to establish the university that, that gets on the map, that people want to be part of. Madeline, I don’t know how this works live, and it’s never happened to me, but my battery is running low.

Can your listeners hold on a second while I grab my cable and plug myself in? Okay.

Madeline Arkins:

Yeah. I’ll tell them a joke in the meantime.

Carl Gombrich:

Do you know any Dutch jokes?

Madeline Arkins:

Oof, okay.I don’t know how much of our audience is Dutch. But regardless, I’m not going to tell you a joke in Dutch. I will take this opportunity, however, to ask if anyone has any questions they would like to send Carl, please use the Q& A and chat function now. And in about, say, 10 minutes, I’ll open up the lines for talking again…

And here’s the moment where I say “and they loved my joke, they loved my Dutch joke”.

Carl Gombrich:

What was your joke? Oh, I love telling jokes. We have a British comedian called Tommy Cooper. Some of your listeners may even know him. He’s just a wonderful, deadpan, strange, surrealist.

Madeline Arkins: I know now for next time to, to have a Dutch joke prepared.

Carl Gombrich:

Sorry about that.

Madeline Arkins:

No, you’re fine. All good. So, challenges. In essence, it seems like it’s mostly bureaucratic and not intellectual, which is good. Maybe like looking on the flip side, what sort of opportunities do you see emerging from this approach that the traditional model overlooks?

Carl Gombrich:

Like any kind of revolutional, let’s say evolution in education, the timelines are very long, and it’s really tough in our modern age where people think if you create something, it has to make an impact within six months. I’ve been interested in the literature coming out from the U.S. on the impact of liberal arts. There’s a very good book published quite recently, maybe two years ago, called Liberal Arts, The Evidence It Needs. And they’ve finally got some a major corpus of longitudinal studies about people who’ve been through the liberal arts system. And this builds on some other work, just serious work, which is done about the number of Nobel Prize winners emerging from the liberal arts and so on.

I’d love to do that in this country because I know from UCL that the several hundred students we graduated from there by the time I left, are simply smashing it. They are doing such amazing things, CEOs of extremely start-ups, starting their own charities.

Of course, they’re big shots in the corporate world as well, you’d expect that. And I think the same thing is going to happen to our students. So we have a slightly different cohort, we are very liberal in the range of students. We like to say some students who struggled at school, or may not have as good grades and we think are still very exciting, some of those students do extremely well with us.

But I do think that the sort of impact of this type of education where you’re exposed to many different perspectives, you have to learn a range of tools… You’re not just a geeky coder, you’re not just an artsy videomaker, I do think those have very long term benefits . The challenge is tracking that having the evidence, that’s the case

Madeline Arkins:

This was going to be my next question, because obviously you have just had your first cohort of graduates. How are you measuring success in interdisciplinarity, or what kind of metrics or processes do you use to evaluate the efficacy of what you’re doing as an institution?

Carl Gombrich:

So the honest answer is we have simple metrics in terms of student satisfaction and employment. The, also honest answer, but one I can’t answer very positively, is I’d love to have a whole framework of researchers set up to test things like competencies and so on, but we’re tiny, we just don’t have that budget.

And that those kinds of personnel, I think this is worth saying, the multiples you get in the U.S. for starting something like this are 10x what you can raise in Europe or the UK. So we started from a tiny faculty, we’re building out from there, small student cohorts.

And so we didn’t set up with a big research arm to test all this, much as I would like to do that. We’ve looked at this before, but now we’re a bit more mature. We’re looking at competency frameworks that have been instigated by some governments, the Singaporean government for example, and we might try to implement those in our tracking of students from when they join to when they leave, but it’s a bit of a cost-benefit thing.

You’ve got to think: How much bureaucracy is this going to take? How much is this going to impact on the students themselves? They feel like guinea pigs, they’re scrutinized all the time, and how much is it really going to give you something you need? And that’s not always obvious, that trade off.

Madeline Arkins:

And also, I mean, you say they were the simple tools, but also the most baseline and of importance, I would say, in that student satisfaction and employability. I don’t think the importance of those can be overlooked.

I had a question on something that you’ve mentioned before is that you increasingly teach on changing ideas of expertise, and particularly in this digital age where knowledge is, in theory and sometimes in practice, becoming more democratised and accessible, how do you see the concept of expertise evolving? How does this shift or impact the way we approach education and learning?

Carl Gombrich:

Yeah, so this, I asked that two parts, but I’ll do the first part rather briefly, because that’s a particular theory of expertise called interactional expertise. And that’s due to a very great sociologist of science in the UK called Harry Collins. I teach on that, and I’m now doing some research into that and its relationship to leadership.

But I think perhaps more interesting for you and your listeners is the whole discussion around AI. And I haven’t come down on one side of this or the other yet, actually, but the dichotomy is becoming clearer to me: It’s either we need even more generalists, more interdisciplinary people able to ask the right question across all sorts of disciplinary boundaries, and interrogate the answer they’re getting from the machine, or, and this would be very impactful on my life because I’ve been on the interdisciplinary side for ages, but it’s possible that because the machine can give us so much information now, we need more and more hyperspecialists to check that information and interrogate it.

And I don’t honestly know the answer yet. I teach a module here which lent very heavily to AI, last year, even before it was hyper trendy, or just at the beginning of the wave. Now it’s almost past its very first phase, but people are still wondering what to do with it. And in this module, students have to co-write an essay with AI.

The essay itself is a vision paper. So it’s deliberately very speculative, very creative. But then they have to also submit a video or audio recording of how they use the AI to create the vision paper. Both parts are assessed. So, in that explainer, I’m looking for that critical engagement and involvement with the AI.

Any student just gives me the AI created essay, but basically gets a zero because you just have to type into the thing and it’ll create an essay. But a student who starts saying “I found this scientific paper, which I trusted because it came from this source and this other one that critiqued it. And then I combined it with this completely different idea of how to apply that science in a new space. I thought that was interesting. So then I had this discussion with chat and they show me this discussion thread”. There, I think we’re done getting somewhere really interesting. All this discussion about unblocking, about ideation that the AI can do if you use it properly. And of course sources, good AI, like the Plexity, which I use all the time now, takes you directly to the source.

So you have to teach students, what is a good source? Why is it a good source? Why do you trust that source? Did you find any other sources which all those kind of meta things you can do. So that’s AI, using it in that kind of generative way for learning and mark and assessing that. But AI gets better and better, it’s going to be really interesting to see whether young people can just learn the right questions to ask it and know which sources to trust and which not, or whether they’re going to have to know in really minute detail whether a source is trustworthy, in which case we’ll just need a whole bunch of really nerdy data scientists or really nerdy engineers to tell us what to trust and whatnot.

Madeline Arkins:

That’s a really interesting way of challenging students because also that kind of media literacy, critical thinking is so necessary and really is not embedded across, and it should be across all.

Carl Gombrich:

I’m amazed, I watch too much YouTube like everyone, and people are at the comments “It was terrible how much that person spoke on the channel”. I’m like, “it’s an edited video. That’s what editing is. It’s that way because the podcast wanted you to hear that person. It’s a not live podcast”.

But that kind of basic media illiteracy is the norm, it seems to me, and how can we go forward as a society unless people’s first response to media is skepticism. Like, where’s this from? How is it edited? What is the maker of the video trying to say? All that stuff. Yeah, I totally agree. That is modern critical thinking.

Way more than arguing, logic of arguments, which is fine and important, but that comes second for me now.

Madeline Arkins:

I’m with you. I wanted to ask you a question about something that you mentioned on a previous podcast you were on, the Ed Futurist podcast a few months ago. I heard a clip of you discussing academia’s tendency to reproduce itself and in particular, academics who hope to produce PhD students who then take their work into the next generation.

There’s been a lot of shifting power dynamics between students and educators in the latter half of the last century, I would say. Do you think these dynamics have changed the reproduction of what has gone before in academia, or what’s your take? Because stopping the wheel of self reproduction is something that I think a lot of people have been trying to do, maybe unsuccessfully.

Carl Gombrich:

That is a fantastic question. Quite a rich question. Let me say first, there’s a problem with size here, right? When you have 8 percent of the population going to university, there’s nothing wrong with trying to reproduce the thoughts of your teachers. That’s like a generational passing of the baton, kind of apprenticeship in intellectual work and so on.

That’s great. Now we have 40, 50%. That’s clearly, I think, detrimental both to thought in general, but also to the vast majority of students. So that’s one thing to think about. Then I think the second thing to say is, and we see this at LIS actually, I think it’s become quite polarised between the humanities and non-humanities, or sciences and engineering.

We brand ourselves as radical. I think that might be a bit of a problem for us, but let’s see going forward. Because it means students are extremely woke, I would say, on the left, hyper left, have all the usual things that go with that. And about half our students, or slightly less, maybe 30, 40%, are pretty in the kind of Elon Musk, Silicon Valley type way, it’s tech-solutions.

And of course there are a bunch of kids in the middle who are far too sensible for all that, but let’s focus on that as a kind of picture. And I think both of those have problems of reproducing themselves, but it’s quite healthy at LIS that they’re actually in one arena. Because they both turn up and go, “Oh, you thought that’s what radical was. Oh, I thought, …”. And then I’m like “okay, you guys have got to get together in a group”. And we do a lot of real world focused work. “You have to work on a consultancy report for external organizations, say on the ethics of their supply chain off. Don’t care if you woke at anti-woke, sort this out, do the problem”.

And so sort of, I think that’s very healthy, from a growth point of view and also getting real things done point of view, but it’s interesting that we have both those camps thinking about how to use the knowledge that we’re telling them. Now neither of those camps, and this is a bit special to LIS because we’re really real world focused, neither of those camps are really looking to create something more in academia. LIS doesn’t really exist for that. There are too many PhDs out there.

Heaven only knows there are just too many PhDs in the world. I mean, it’s fine. You want to stay in university, do a PhD, it’s harmless. But I honestly think, all the stats will bear me out here, that it’s pretty useless.

It drops your employability a bit, at least in the UK and the U.S., I’m not sure about elsewhere, and so on. We don’t have that problem at LIS, we encourage students to take the learning we give them and have some real impact with that in the real world. But I think that, even in more mainstream universities, there should be more help in to help students connect what they’re doing with what the vast majority of them will do later rather than do a PhD.

Madeline Arkins:

And that, those kind of arenas where two maybe semi-opposing groups can come together and work on something and not taking divine inspiration from one lecturer, one point of view, but coming together with a diversity of opinion.

Carl Gombrich:

We have two statements that guide our curriculum. One is in order to tackle complex real world problems, you have to pursue multiple perspectives actively. And in order to tackle complex real world problems, you need to think in terms of networks and relationships.

So the pursuing perspectives thing is quite a value statement in itself. You can’t escape value statements. We have ours here too. And you might see, if anything, that is slightly more towards the more leftist side of things than the rightist. But be that as it may, it still means that if you’re on the left, you have to pursue a perspective which actively challenges your whole worldview and might be, as we sometimes say now, make you feel unsafe, all those things. That’s part of the deal here. You have to pursue multiple perspectives, no matter where you end up.

The other one, actually, to have something in terms of networks and relationships for students is just great because that’s how actually the world works, how we get things done. Some of our assignments require them to reach out and find someone in the real world who’s interested in their project to supervise it or to watch their presentation, something like that. It’s a kind of non-academic, but very real, how they’re going to make progress in the world.

Madeline Arkins:

Far better than the typical slow-burn of student projects that everyone despairs over. I am conscious of time, Carl, but we did get one question that I wanted to ask you that is more so about the teaching process. One of the attendees asked “what are some recommended digital tools that maybe you use or that you recommend for academic education?”.

Carl Gombrich:

Interesting. Thank you. Gosh, this has flown by. Sorry, it’s gone too quick. We do flipped learning here, we don’t have a very innovative learning platform. I’m not sure I should advertise it as one of the three main ones in this country. It’s fine. It’s fine, but we put all our stuff up on advance at the time when we meet the students, the in person, synchronous times.

We do a lot of activities in real time. The tool which I’ve used that was most productive, was actually the Butter learning platform. We, unfortunately, have moved away from it because we have gone on Microsoft teams and we’re supposed to do everything in-house. So there’s a bureaucratic/techno constraint, but I did like Butter. If your listeners don’t know it, it’s cutesy, but lots of nice affordances as a communal whiteboard. The breakout rooms are great, it’s a good tool. It’s it’s like Zoom, like Teams, but way better, specifically designed for learning.

So that’s the specific tool I’ve mentioned. I’d like us to do more things like VR. We’ve got a little bit of that going on in some pockets, but we haven’t really dived into that.

Madeline Arkins:

First itme I heard of Butter learning myself. I will definitely check it out. Carl, I would love to continue asking you questions specifically also more about your opera background, but maybe we’ll have to save that for another day.

Carl Gombrich:

That’d be lovely, Madeline. Are you interested in opera?

Madeline Arkins:

I played classical flute, violin, and piano, so I do love a bit of opera. And today, that I get to talk about opera on the UIIN podcast, but maybe today is the day.

Carl, if people want to find out more about LIS or indeed um, find out more about you, how can they find you? Where can they find you?

Carl Gombrich:

I have a personal page on LinkedIn and on X/Twitter, and recently on Blue Sky as well. Open to people contacting me, I may not be able to get back, I do get tens of – or hundreds – of inquiries a week. The website is LIS London Interdisciplinary School in the UK, you can have a look there and contact us through that if you’re interested as well.

Madeline Arkins:

Sounds good. All right. Don’t get too excited and all go to Carl at once, he’s a busy man. But that’s great. Thanks so much for your time, Carl,

Carl Gombrich:

Thanks, Madeline.

Madeline Arkins:

Talk to you soon. Thanks, everybody.

Carl Gombrich:

Thank you. Bye.

Ready for more?

If you’re curious about the potential of AI to reshape higher education, balancing the integration of advanced technologies with ethical considerations, head now to our podcast episode Learning with AI: Balancing technology, pedagogy and ethics with Carla Aerts, currently Strategic Advisor at Erasmus X Innovation at Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

Are you an educator that wants to become more impactful and entrepreneurial, we have compiled a list of resources and opportunities in our article How to become an impactful educator? to help you on this journey.

Stay tuned for the next episode on this series and don’t forget to follow us on your preferred podcast platform!