In a sense, interdisciplinarity involves attacking a subject from various angles and methods, eventually cutting across disciplines and forming a new method for felicitous understanding of the subject. A common goal (understanding) unites the different methods and acknowledges an entire subject or problem, even if it spreads to other disciplines.
Interdisciplinarity as the term is most often used in educational circles occurs when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand, including the case of the team-taught course where students are required to understand how a given subject (for example, land use) may appear differently when examined by different disciplines (e.g., biology, geography, and economics).
Interdisciplinarity is a typical trait of holistic approaches in science and other fields. Not all those who are committed to interdisciplinarity consider themselves holists, however, as they may not embrace the connotations of the term.