Arab Educational Information Network

The paper is an attempt to answer the following question: to what extent can interdisciplinary programs enable higher education to achieve a qualitative leap, and accordingly, what are the necessary conditions for such a leap? The paper is guided by the experience of the MA Program in Democracy and Human Rights, which was founded as an interdisciplinary program at Birzeit University in 2000. Specifically, the paper examines an empirical case study of graduates of the program conducted in 2007, which carried out an assessment of the impact of the program on the behavior of the graduates and the social, political, and cultural attitudes embodied in their world-views and ways of life, through examining the changes in their respective realities and status in the Palestinian society.The study under review is premised on the assumption that the capacity of an educational program to influence its students constitutes the criterion of its success. Believing in the urgent need for social change and modernization, we consider the examination of the motivation for such change among graduates as the means for answering the initial question regarding the necessary qualitative leap and its pre-requisite conditions. In other words, in conceptualizing this qualitative leap, there needs to be a review of the contribution of a program to the “development of rebels who are able to take a stance critical of society and to work for change” (حشوه, 2004, 16) and who have a “sense of responsibility towards public issues” (Baber 1988, 174). Accordingly, this paper seeks to show that an interdisciplinary approach to university education is more effective in achieving the goal of social change.In addition to this study, and in order to demonstrate the proposed hypothesis, this paper will use an analysis of social needs and how to meet them. Social change is linked to a vision of society and the role of the individual therein. Hence, it is not possible to support students in building a holistic vision of the world through programs that limit analysis and vision to a specific field of knowledge. Moreover, there is an urgent need to find ways of linking educational programs to daily experience, outside the scope of acquiring employment skills.(Published Abstract)