DISCIPLINARITY
How prescient were the worlds of Winston Churchill: “The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.” We must recognize what is called for in this new world – even as we hold on to certain perennial skills and values that may be at risk. In the future, individuals who wish to thrive will need to be experts in at least one area – they will need a discipline that constitutes a distinctive way of thinking about the world.The disciplined mind has mastered at least one way of thinking – a distinctive mode of cognition that characterizes a specific scholarly discipline, craft, or profession. It also knows how to work steadily over time to improve skill and understanding. Without at least one discipline under his belt, the individual is destined to march to someone else’s tune. How to achieve a disciplined mind? Four steps are essential:
1. Identify truly important topics or concepts within the discipline. Some of these will be content – for example, the nature of gravity, the components of a civil war, the rise of the novel, the laws of supply and demand. Some of these will be methodological: how to set up a scientific experiment; how to analyze a Shakespearean sonnet, a classical sonata form, a medieval triptych, a Supreme Court decision, a balance sheet.
2. Spend a significant amount of time on this topic. If it is worth studying, it is worth studying deeply, over a significant period of time, using a variety of examples and modes of analysis.
3. Approach the topic in a number of ways taking advantage of the variety of ways in which individuals can learn as explained by my theory of multiple intelligences.
4. Most important, set up “performances of understanding” under a variety of conditions. So long as we examine individuals only on problems to which they have already been exposed, we cannot ascertain whether they have truly understood. Maybe, but it just as likely that they are simply relying on a good memory. It is much more reliable to pose a new question or puzzle – one on which individuals have not been coached – and see how they fare.Those who would hope to continue teaching literature, music, philosophy, and history need to present these topics in ways that speak to new generations and address issues of current concern, while avoiding curricula that speak only to those with a professional stake in the field.
Howard Gardner, Five Minds for the Future, Harvard Business Press, 2008
For decades, academics have tended to treat their respective disciplines as separate entities complete in themselves, disregarding the value that other disciplines might have in improving learning in their own subjects. The encouragement of interdependence among disciplines and subject areas can benefit teachers, students and, ultimately, society at large. The arts are especially well suited to interdisciplinary learning, and have the potential to strengthen learning abilities across subject areas. There is a growing body of research that suggests that training students in the arts may change the structure of their brains and the way they think. After all, creativity and imagination – typically associated with the arts and which the arts encourage – are critical to many aspects of life, in and out of school. The College Board recognizes the value of the arts as teaching tools for interdisciplinary learning in addition to being distinct subjects in themselves.National Task Force on the Arts in Education, Arts at the Core: Recommendations for Advancing the State of Arts Education in the 21st Century, Report Presented to Board of Trustees, The College Board, Fall 2009
In schools, subjects tend to be hermetically sealed off from each other – you do science on a Thursday morning, you do math in the afternoons. And this is really a feature of education, because outside of education people know naturally that all these things flow in and out of each other. Disciplines affect each other. There appears to be an increasing desire and need to break down the traditional “discipline silos” in favor of a more integrated study and understanding of complex systems.Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. Capstone, 2001
By and large, both in public and independent school education, there is still a tendency to focus on the disciplines separately, and, frankly, there's a lot of value in that. There's great value in going deeply into a subject and learning the tools and the approaches that are used by specialists in those areas. But in practice, there's almost no profession in the world of work where there aren't integrated perspectives.In the past, there was this polarization. It was “Should we integrate the curriculum?" versus “Should we have separate disciplines?” Now we're taking a much more sensible approach. For example, you now see courses on environmental science that deal with science but also with law and legal issues. Some state standards are going out of their way to formally build in more interdisciplinary linkages. It's not the debate it used to be.
But there is significant work ahead. Many high schools have siloed departments. Even people in middle schools designed in teams don't always use them effectively. And yet, a teacher working within a conventional program can do plenty to bring a degree of interdisciplinary richness to the classroom. When a teacher can shift the focus of a course around significant and important ideas or concepts, you'll find that tends to breed more interdisciplinary thinking, And thinking is what it's all about.
Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Active Literacy Across the Curriculum. Eye on Education, 2006
Discipline-based content standards (language arts, math, music, science, social studies, theatre, etc.) puts us further into silos, sending each content area off to work with that discipline content away from everyone else. This is not best practice. It is exactly what we have to avoid in order to develop 21st century skills.As professors and scholars within higher education, we often find ourselves functioning within our own disciplinary and even sub-disciplinary silos. We do not get the benefit of exposure to pedagogical practices and principles that have their origins in other disciplines. As a result, it becomes easy to lose sight of the broader educational goals that inform our disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) practices. In this way, our disciplines often come to fix the boundaries of our approaches to pedagogy.
Michael Mascolo, Christina Hardway, & Deborah Margolis, "Editorial: On Pedagogy and the Human Sciences"
Pedagogy and the Human Sciences, 1, No. 1, 2009
In the new millennium, the world will be an increasingly interconnected place. We need to look at education holistically – as a total system with continuity through all levels. Right now, we are doing the opposite. We do not teach students to see the world as an interconnected place – to see the big view, to think integratively. We do not teach them to function in a complex world. The fundamental educational experience of our students now is that they learn in silos, right from kindergarten, a stale curriculum that does not connect to the society in which students actually live and function. We can’t produce integrative thinkers with a nonintegrative machine. Why do we teach our children to think in silos and not integratively? There is some sense to it, but plenty of nonsense as well.On the sense side, the world of knowledge is vast. We can’t expect everyone to tackle it like a Renaissance scholar. So we pursue simplification and specialization to handle the complexity of the challenge of learning in a vast sea of knowledge. As such, a critical part of education involves breaking the interconnected world into chunks – simplification – that can be tackled and mastered one by one – specialization. This makes sense. Our students need to gain mastery, and mastery is achieved more quickly with simplification.
On the nonsense side, we have become so comfortable with the drive for mastery that we have forgotten in the educational world about the interconnectedness. We simplify and implicitly believe that multiple specializations in a wide assortment of simplified subjects will educate our students well. That is where the fallacy lies. Side-by-side learning of topics does not equate to integrative learning.
Creating an education system that can produce integration is no small task. Right now, as the world changes rapidly and our stale educational bureaucracy refuses to change, young people are ahead of us. They are connected to the Internet and already linked to a global bank of knowledge and people, which is starting to make their school experience seem less and less relevant. Many of them no longer bother with studying and extracurricular activities, but are participating in the real world by working after school and communicating globally over the Internet.
Roger Martin, What Canada Could be for Education in the 21st Century, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2001
