Southeast Center for Education in the Arts

INTERDISCIPLINARITY

We live in a society that prizes depth in a single discipline over breadth in multiple areas. Innovation, however, demands that we see the world through multiple lenses at the same time, and draw meaning from seemingly disparate information.

Interdisciplinarity engages teachers and students in connecting and integrating several academic schools of thought, professions, or technologies in the pursuit of a common task. An interdisciplinary community or project is made up of people from multiple disciplines and professions who are engaged in creating and applying new knowledge as they work together as equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. They approach a problem from various angles and methods, considering diverse and even contradictory points of view, eventually cutting across disciplines and forming a new method for understanding the subject.

Cultivating interdisciplinarity as a habit of mind is essential to the education of informed and engaged citizens and leaders capable of analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information from multiple sources in order to render reasoned decisions. Interdisciplinarity requires that those involved have interactional expertise to improve their efficiency working across multiple disciplines as well as within the new interdisciplinary area.

Integrative education cuts across subject-matter lines, bringing together various aspects of the curriculum into meaningful association to focus upon broad areas of study. It reflects the interdependent real world, and involves the learner’s body, thoughts, feelings, senses, and intuition in learning experiences that unify knowledge and provide a greater understanding than that which could be obtained by examining the parts separately.

21st CENTURY PEDAGOGY

Even if you have a 21st Century classroom – flexible and adaptable; even if you are a 21st Century teacher – an adaptor, a communicator, a leader and a learner, a visionary and a model, a collaborator and risk taker; even if your curriculum reflects the new paradigm and you have the facilities and resources that could enable 21st century learning – you will only be a 21st century teacher if how we teach changes as well. Our pedagogy must also change.

How we teach must reflect how our students learn, it must also reflect the world they will emerge into. This is a world that is rapidly changing, connected, adapting and evolving. Our style and approach to teaching must emphasize the learning in the 21st century.

We need to teach knowledge or content in context with the tasks and activities the students are undertaking. Our students respond well to real world problems and our delivery of knowledge should scaffold the learning process and provide a foundation for activities.

21st Century students, our digital natives, are collaborative, so our teaching should also model collaboration. A vast array of collaborative tools are available to – wikis, classroom blogs, collaborative document tools, social networks, learning management systems. These tools are enablers of collaboration, and therefore enablers of 21st century teaching and learning.

Today’s students do not want abstract examples; rather they focus on real world problems firmly set in a basis of understanding. They also want what they learn in one subject to be relevant and applicable in another curriculum area. As teachers we need to extend beyond our areas of expertise, collaborating with our peers in other subjects to link and bind the learning in one area to the other. Projects should be encompassing, bringing together and reinforcing the learning in the disciplines. The sum of their learning will be greater than the individual aspects taught in isolation. This is a holistic overview of the education process, building and valuing each and every aspect of the 21st Century students’ education.

We must be student centric. Our curricula and assessments are inclusive, interdisciplinary and contextual; based on real world examples. Our students are key elements in the assessment process, intimate in it from the start to finish, from establishing purpose and criteria to assessing and moderating. We must establish a safe environment for our students to not only collaborate in but also to discuss, reflect, and feedback in. We make use of collaborative and project based learning, using enabling tools and technologies to facilitate this. We develop key fluencies and make use of higher order thinking skills. Our tasks, curricula, assessments and learning activities are designed to build on the lower order thinking skills and develop higher order thinking skills. Our teaching must also be inclusive of the different learning styles our learners have.

UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN

We want students to understand. The goal is understanding not superficial knowledge. Many teachers begin with and remain focused on textbooks, favored lessons, and time-honored activities – the inputs – rather than deriving those means from what is implied in the desired results – the output. To put it in an odd way, too many teachers focus on the teaching and not the learning. They spend most of their time thinking, first, about what they will do, what materials they will use, and what they will ask students to do rather than first considering what the learner will need in order to accomplish the learning goals. – Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe