DISCIPLINE SILOS
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 states 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 JacobsActive 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 |
