Editorial Statement

Winter 2014

Welcome to IMPACT’s third year of publication! As many of you know, IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is the peer-reviewed online journal published by faculty and administrators at the College of General Studies, Boston University, and is dedicated to exploring the interconnections among disciplines. The journal is also keen to demonstrate how interdisciplinary research and pedagogy not only inform, but also illuminate one another.

A two-year, team-taught, interdisciplinary general education program, the College of General Studies has always encouraged students to integrate two or more disciplines into their thinking and writing. By the time they leave our College to matriculate into their majors at Boston University, we want our students to be well-versed in the art and practice of thinking through disciplines to the connections and dissonances that can help them become stronger scholars and attend to real-world problems.

Whether they consider themselves interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary, IMPACT readers and writers are also committed to ways of thinking that account for various disciplines and diverse ways of knowing. As a result, our writers often explore how disciplines inform, complicate or otherwise alter one another; or they examine how interdisciplinary thinking makes undergraduate education and higher education better and more robust. Despite their diverse interests and fields, the teachers/ scholars/writers whose prose grace the pages of our journal share a keen sense that what they have to say can help another person in his or her intellectual journey. That seems a fine model for our future students as well.

To usher in our third year of publication, and as a gesture of thanks to our founding editor, Natalie McKnight, IMPACT has undergone a bit of an aesthetic transformation. We mean this transformation to commemorate what has occurred over the past four issues – IMPACT has asserted its voice in the field of interdisciplinary studies – and to welcome the future. For this voice, we heartily thank College of General Studies Dean ad interim Natalie McKnight.

Although aesthetically our journal may look different, we still look forward to your submissions, just as we always have. You can find all the relevant information about submissions, archives, and our annual BEST ESSAY AWARD on our homepage. Thank you for taking us along with you on your intellectual journey.

Megan Sullivan, Editor