Crossing Boundaries and Creating Connections

Interdisciplinary and Innovation

The analogy of a rubber band stretching out to bring people into a space (Interdisciplinarity and Innovation Education, 2013) helps with grasping the notion of bringing colleagues together from all fields of expertise to pool together their resources, their knowledge and their ideas to plan together, make decisions together and set goals together. Keeping in mind the purpose of education as outlined in the Ross Spiral curriculum (2015) as being generating a higher level of understanding of the world we live in, there has to be a massive change in how we foster interdisciplinarity in our secondary schools. Different domains for subjects need to combine resources, expertise, vision, and assessment to work towards achieving a connectivness that supports this purpose.

Here is my interdisciplinary professional connections in a primary school setting. Much of the planning and curriculum delivery design is done together across syndicates and whole school. I call up support in various areas of expertise to work with me on getting the best recipe for all children.

I would identify a potential interdisciplinary connection goal as working more with experts in the community both local and globally. I recently worked with someone from Environment Southland to plan and design a project on our waterways. Seeing the success in this has inspired me to get experts involved early in intended inquiries to support development and planning. Using online connections will enable this to occur anywhere in the world. The benefits  also include students making sense of what they are learning. It  gives purpose and real world problem solving opportunities for the learning across all curriculum areas. It  provides a common reason for using science knowledge with maths or technological knowledge with the Arts. Motivation and inspiration flourishes if students have opportunities to be creative and innovative with what they know and what they need to know to solve problems. Self-regulated learning also benefits from students taking more ownership for the direction of their learning. Other desired 21st century learning skills such as collaboration and communication have greater opportunity to develop along with the use of ICT for learning - all due to becoming more interconnected with the right people as our role as educators becomes more of 'connector' to these resources.

References:

ACRLog. (2015). A Conceptual Model for Interdisciplinary Collaboration. Retrieved from http://acrlog.org/2015/05/14/a-conceptual-model-for-interdisciplinary-collaboration

Ross Institute. (2015, July 5). Ross Spiral Curriculum: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Science. [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHZhkB0FJik

ThomasMcDonaghGroup. ( 2011, May 13). Interdisciplinarity and Innovation Education.[video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDdNzftkIpA