Introduction
Education is the means by which a society ensures its own future. Education brings generations together in the common task of making a future for all. However, the future isn’t waiting for what young people must be readied for. In this manifesto I am concerned with how transdisciplinarity across the sciences and arts can move education beyond siloed practices of prescription and enculturation, whereby education becomes much more than preparing for a future which may be predicted, feared or simply expected. Instead, in this manifesto, it is suggested that the time has come to expand what education is for. By involving participation of children and young people in co-authoring of multiple creativities through transdisciplinary education, we could provide a key to achieving transformative school change.
The only constant in our modern world is change. But there is another constant and that is the questions that continue to arise about how disciplines shape how we perceive, interact and respond with the world and how we should position diverse creativities at the centre of schooling. The ongoing proliferation of research around transdisciplinary practices challenges the notion of the separability of disciplines and calls for new approaches to broaden disciplinary practices. While many of society’s’ traditional institutions have faded away or struggle for relevance, the school and the work of teachers remain vital. This is not to say teaching is easy. In fact, working in schools today is a highly complex and sophisticated endeavour, not to mention stressful and full of accountabilities. So, if the world is in a constant process of change with conflicting agendas and ideological positions, what might this mean for re-orientating specialist disciplines with/in transdisciplinary education?
To change what we do, to be and to think differently, to do more than just teach creatively, to teach for diverse creativities, transgressing and transcending disciplinary boundaries, requires us to ask: Which creativities1 are we educating for? Diverse and new creativities are both emerging and continuously co-authored in ways that are dynamic and differentiated. And which radical options should we consider to counter the current ‘siloed’ nature of subject disciplines in education to welcome in the teaching of transdisciplinary creativity?
Understanding how sciences and arts meet and how this comes to matter requires the erasure of subject silos and the activation of new ways of converging subject disciplines, not simply as spaces for acquisition of knowledges and skills but as transdisciplinary co-authorings (Burnard, Colucci-Gray and Cooke, 2022). This means generating questions, pulling things apart to see how they work and putting them together again in a different way to see what else they can produce; to co-author transdisciplinary future-making education.
A rhizomatic of transdisciplinary practice
Figure1: A rhizomatic of transdisciplinary practice2
This is an invitation to think, act and read critically and reflect on the market place of knowledge and knowledge creation, where both scientists and artists are known as ‘creatives’ who are tasked with coming up with new ideas that the competition calls for, not just for designing new knowledge products, but for entrepreneurship and innovation. This is also the hallmark of the successful entrepreneur, and often placed at the top in any list of attributes that a STEM-based education should inculcate in students exposed to it, whether they be heading into science or arts, or more likely transdisciplinary careers.
This is an invitation to you to think, act and read immersively. How? For example, readers can read with a certain sense of resistance but also an openness to departures from conventional practice. You may well witness your own re-engendering to rid yourself of some of your old and familiar ways of teaching.
This is an invitation to you to think, act and read reflexively by shifting attention to new pedagogies by de-coupling the language of a discipline and/or creativity from its original context. By co-authoring new opportunities to imagine, design and inhabit spaces of experimentation, collaboration, and reflection together and become change-makers with each other to create togetherness.
Disciplines and disciplinary thinking dominate much of the educational landscape. Teaching and learning are often still enacted (and measured and validated) within the boundaries of disciplinary practices. These disciplinary practices feature embodied habits, defined relationships and material-linguistic structures. We see these disciplinary structures and hierarchies as the focus of knowledge-rich curricula, whereby skills and understandings are sequenced and specified in detail within the realm of a subject domain, and then measured on standardised assessments for comparative performance such as PISA. We also see it in the ways specialist disciplinary teachers embody what it means to be a teacher in their habitual responses during teaching and learning, abiding to established language and norms and finding dissonances when asked to be differently.
Transdisciplinarity, as a practice that transgresses and transcends disciplinary boundaries, offers us the potential to respond to new demands and imperatives. We need to re-vision the narratives of future making in education. We need to unleash the power of transdisciplinarity as a space to re-tell and re-see, not as a site of disciplinary multiplication, but as practices which transgress disciplinary habits, learnt responses and defined boundaries; a relational space in which humans and non-humans (materials, environments) are inter-reliant with each other, neither being more important that the other, but entangled in practices of forging a way together, of making with, materiality and material enactments (recognising that our relationship to the physical world and how we engage with it impacts how we learn). All of this opens up new ways of attending upon a world in formation with the following repositionings:
- A shift to future-making education which needs to unravel, unsettle and rupture to get underneath the skin of diverse and multiple creativities.
- A shift where teachers and learners co-envision and enact transdisciplinary possibilities within educational structures, co-authoring radical departures through intra-action; with encounters of and engagement with transdisciplinary couplings and agentic meeting of sciences and arts.
- A shift from knowing about to living in the world, in doing and being an educational learning community in communion
- A shift from the priorities of a short-term economic agenda to longer-term future-oriented priorities for a safe and sustainable future where the threshold between the past and as-yet-unknown future of transdisciplinary educational practice co-authors future-making education.
- A shift away from the norms, codes and conventions of siloed education to future-making education which offers more-than-disciplines in order to re-see, re-make and re-materialise the agency of transdisciplinarity.
Leaders can inspire, and counteract fears of embracing transdisciplinarity, at three levels. First, at the strategic level, school communities need to rethink their educational aims and curricula by honing their capacities for transformative change by infusing, framing embodying the agency of transdisciplinarity. Second, at the system level, whole-school practices need to work together to co-author, develop and operationalise transdisciplinary creativities. Thirdly, finally, at the individual and social level, leaders can collectively co-create and choreograph new practices of possibility, moving from linear, technocratic and siloed education as preparation for the future, to re-envisioning transdisciplinary empowerment for future-making education.
References
Burnard, P., Colucci-Gray, L., & Cooke, C. (2022). Transdisciplinarity: Re-visioning how science and arts together can enact democratizing creative educational experiences. Review of Research in Education, 46, 374–397.
Burnard, P., Colucci-Gray, L., and Sinha, P. (2021). Transdisciplinarity: Letting arts and science teach together. Curriculum Perspectives, 4(1), 113-118.
Burnard, P., Colucci-Gray, L. (Eds.) (2020). Why Scence and Art Creativities Matter: (Re-) Configuring STEAM for Future-making Education. Brill-i-Sense.
