Applied Practice in Context Activity 7 - Crossing Boundaries and Creating Connections

Keri's coggle of connections

Applied Practice in Context Week 31 Crossing Boundaries and Creating Connections

Activity 7. My Interdisciplinary Connections

 

When I was creating this coggle, I really had to think hard about who my connections were. My mind went blank. I am part of huge team making every moment count for tauira at our school. Trying to list them all, plus potential connections (orange links) was quite a challenging task.

In saying that though, I could see the empathic horizons and opportunities for cross pollination with the tauira in my class. I am tasked with enabling and encouraging tauira to see life through many lenses, looking at different perspectives from a holistic way as shared by Dr Deanne McDonagh and Joyce Thomas (2011). We will get to see how the world works beyond what we know we can do. In holistic approaches "knowledge is perceived within experience and cannot be separated from the personal meaning given to it by the individual" (Crowell, 1995, p. 13)

Having been a NE teacher in my former life, I immediately made a connection to the Ross Spiral Curriculum. The cross-curricular nature of his vision, was familiar as this is similar to the way we designed our Play Based Learning programme. I can see the level of engagement the tauira have in discovering their world, with cultural history at the core of learning.

With my class of Y8’s this year I have not professed to be the keeper of all knowledge and have invited them all to become the teachers, sharing their own knowledge of specific topics, key ideas, concepts as we journey through the year together.

The National Standards for Year 8 in Literacy are to meet the demands of the NZC at Curriculum Level 4. This means that tauira need to be independently choosing the most effective and appropriate strategies for reading and writing across the different learning areas.

I believe the better equipped tauira and I are to make those cross curricular connections, the more effective the learning. Being in a connected world, we do not learn one subject by itself.

One potential interdisciplinary connection I will be making this year is to lead the Sustainability Pod in our school to create a sustainable garden area, embed sustainable practices across our school and to make a change to the sustainable thinking culture with our tauira and staff. No mean feat!

Joint planning, decision making and goal setting will take place across the school, community and they will go global when we share our project on our school blog. The first connections will be with the tauira, teachers, SLT and BOT. Using the  ‘A Conceptual Model for Interdisciplinary Collaboration’ (ACRLog post, 2015) we will establish conditions for meeting, the qualities and attitudes required and form common goals.

A Conceptual Model for Interdisciplinary Collaboration - Table 1.

Workplace Conditions	Qualities/Attitudes	Common Goals
Regular communication Standing meetings Physical space Administrative support	Cooperative—able to compromise Equitable—respect for roles Trust—perceived competence Shared vulnerability—safe setting to explore, inquire & critique Enthusiasm—desire to continue collaboration	Identify individual strengths Select conference & publication venues that “count” for both, or alternate Establish research “pipeline” & philosophy Articulate/update timelines

The groups of contributors will be meeting face to face using a variety of tools  to record our ideas. Once we have sorted through what we want the project to look like then we will invite tauira, staff and community to contribute to the digital design of the garden, the messages and practices of sustainability using a variety of digital media. The inquiry process used by our school will also drive the planning process. My focus will be on creating a plan that makes interdisciplinary connections across the curriculum.

I have a vision… Stay tuned for photos and blog evidence.

References

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

Mathison, S., & Freeman, M. (1998). The Logic of Interdisciplinary Studies. Report Series 2.33.

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