Taxonomy of Non-Disciplinary Approaches, Applied Implications for Designing Curriculums in Economics

In the past, philosophy of education and curriculum designing focused on specialization and single disciplinarity approach. But since the turn of the 20th century, by a vast literature of realizing real and new educational needs and competencies beyond a single discipline, and criticizing the limits of that narrow approach to the reality, defining integrated curriculum or non-disciplinarity approaches has been a topic of discussion. Over the last decades, theorists offered six basic categories for non-disciplinary works: Parallel Disciplinary Approach, Interdisciplinary Approach, Multi-Disciplinary Approach, Cross-Disciplinary Approach, Plural-Disciplinary Approach and Supra/Trans-Disciplinary Approach. Through these approaches, integration seemed to be a matter of degree and method from fundamentally different starting points. Economics also is essentially an integrated discipline from different social sciences, mathematics, economic subjects, knowledge and ideas, and even methodology of natural sciences, and inevitably, its curriculum, educational programs and courses can not be designed unless benefited from these literatures and approaches in the curriculum designing subject area. The present article briefly defines the non-disciplinarity approaches and shows their implications, applications and theoretical capacity in designing different possible curriculums and graduate educational courses in Economics