Big Questions on Embracing Transdisciplinarity in SciCulture

Dr Kerry Chappell shares her reflections from the Athens course:

SciCulture’s first course focused on the theme: Future of Education and has left me with many questions, particularly around what it means to genuinely engage in Transdisciplinary practice. This has revolved around issues of understanding, materiality and space.

As an evaluator, I’ve listened to students from performing arts/educational philosophy and natural sciences backgrounds talk around, through and across their discipline concepts and processes. They’ve found themselves unable to move forward at times as they’re either using the same terms to mean different things or are simply speaking in different languages. I’ve been impressed by their ability to keep working through these impasses with respectful good humour. To witness them emerge on the other side, having allowed themselves to experience confusion; to try, and not always succeed, in seeing the problem through the other person’s eyes, has been extremely rewarding. I’ve seen outcomes generated which honour their backgrounds but which also find complementary and engaging ways to share their debates on educational futures.

As a tutor, I have debated with colleagues as to how our own Transdisciplinary role modelling is working. Should we be doing more team teaching, for example? How do we challenge our own pedagogic habits to really address course content, as well as embodied dialogic creative pedagogy – what we claim we are striving towards? We have also been troubled by our relationship with materiality and space. How can we work within and through our teaching spaces to engage different ways of knowing, including the embodied? In what ways does it matter what resources we offer our participants as to how their thinking develops? Furthermore, I ponder how working through scientific hypothesising or the body or with post-it notes, through art installation practices or design thinking change the meaning inherent within that material or process. We can see and feel that it does, and our next job is to figure out how.