This brings new challenges to current forms of organization and transmission of knowledge, but our educational systems often remain rigid and do not appear able to keep the pace of change. As a result, a serious gap emerges between what the traditional educational organisations are producing and what society requires. In order to equip young people with the skills needed to address current and future societal challenges, we believe it is crucial to try and align the traditional educational institutions (both school systems and universities) with the ways R&I is produced,
identifying the limits of discipline-based knowledge organisation and proposing new ways to address them through interdisciplinarity.
To innovate science education for the era of acceleration we need to support universities and schools to recognise and break down the institutional, conceptual, social, professional, epistemological and cultural barriers to science and social innovation induced by a vertical disciplinary organisation. This way they can be able to develop, in the young generation, inter-multi-transdisciplinary thinking skills needed to grapple with the new methods and features of R&I and play an active role in our society.
FEDORA has gathered inputs from a variety of voices to propose recommendations for co-teaching and open schooling. Preliminary findings came from three-part studies using literature review, interviews and interdisciplinary study groups. From this data, three “shared narratives” arose.
An idea that produced a great resonance in the study group was realising that interdisciplinarity in STEM means more than managing tensions, it also considers managing balance. What are the tensions that we are talking about? Tensions between belonging and not belonging, defining or negotiating meanings, going in or out of a comfort zone, zooming in and zooming out -from details to big pictures and vice versa.
By managing balance, we mean managing a particular kind of equilibrium between what we call “sense-making skills” -systems, critical, analytical thinking- and “strange-making skills” -creative, imaginative, anticipative thinking.
Informed by the papers of Akkerman and Bakker on boundary crossing and objects, and by the Family Resemblance Approach, developed by Sibel Erduran, Zoubeida R. Dagher and colleagues, we framed the space where we started our exploratory journey.
We got inspired by the Gaelic word "meitheal", which means the spirit of cooperation and sharing between neighbours which is that wonderful mixture of downright common-sense and imaginative understanding, by which communities survive and thrive. Also by the performances of Gandini Juggling company and by the city of Euphemia, described by Italo Calvino in his book “The invisible cities”.
By exploring the multi-dimensional roles of disciplines, the barriers they create, and their pros in structuring reasoning and mediating the interaction, we reached a deepened understanding of each role. We then challenged ourselves by wondering what attitudes and skills are needed to accept the risk of crossing boundaries and have an authentic experience as “boundary people”.
Let’s “experience the boundaries” together, let’s melt our experiences, and let’s meet at the city of Euphemia, where the merchants of seven nations gather at every solstice and equinox.
"...summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia"
Barrier: a fence or other obstacle that prevents movement or access. -Oxford Online Dictionary
Disciplines can produce epistemological and cognitive barriers since each discipline has its own epistemology, in terms of aims and values, practices, methods and ways to systematize knowledge. Hence, professionals and their disciplinary identities can emerge in interdisciplinary contexts as obstacles.
Interdisciplinarity is a very timely and relevant theme, but institutions do not seem to provide real guidelines to manage inter-multi-trans-disciplinarity. Moreover, the problem of how to foster inter-transdisciplinary or trans-institutional collaborations and connect educational contexts to the job realm remains open. In many cases, the creation of inter-trans-multi-disciplinary collaborations is in fact hindered by evaluation/legitimation/accountability criteria in the institutions, together with specific funding systems. Furthermore, academic and school culture, more or less implicitly, seems to produce a “culture of closure”.
What is a culture of closure and how does it relate to barriers?
A culture of closure is created, for example, by valuing more dissensus and specific forms of disciplinary expertise rather than abilities like consensus building, and the capacity to legitimize others' roles or expertise in multi-/inter-disciplinary teams.*
We found that cultural aspects- within institutional domains -manifest themselves as perceptions that become implicit assumptions, rituals, and habits of mind and hence emerge as emotional barriers. Emotional barriers can be represented by the feeling of discomfort or a sense of insecurity about one’s own role and expertise. These feelings might be due to factors characterizing the community’s attitude and what we called the “culture of closure” and by asymmetries/differences in the roles that close contexts “naturally” reproduce. They can also derive from the clash between contrasting beliefs that act implicitly.
About “boundary people”
A similar deep sense of discomfort may be felt by “boundary people” within close disciplinary communities. People hardly possess multiple domains of expertise in one individual, and the main strategy cannot be to enlarge the expertise to other disciplines. Thus, boundary people must work in a team rethinking themselves from the epistemic point of view, experience new roles in the development of knowledge in a team of experts and relate to her/his own and others’ expertise in a different way.
However, interdisciplinary teamwork is not only difficult at the epistemic level. It is also challenging at a ground level due to the lack of cognitive skills that seem not so relevant in disciplinary contexts, like:
In disciplinary closed communities, symbolic languages, representations and communication practices are developed. In order to collaborate and “negotiate” in interdisciplinary contexts, it is necessary to address the need to find a shared language (tools, words, structures...) and the obstacles associated with this. When languages are competing, it can happen that there is little motivation to change. Moreover, finding ways to convey is strenuous, and although a set of actions is required, it goes way beyond making a checklist. It requires finding appropriate languages and effective ways to describe nonvertical expertise.
-A complete report on this topic is part of Deliverable 4.1-
*We can also name the capability of bridging, the ability to understand the cultural and social background that frames or influences one's view/perception/reaction.
Boundary-crossing mechanisms are “learning potentials'' that need to be activated.
Their activation can be facilitated if the “trading zone” is properly created or if it occurs in new contexts or third spaces, where habits are given up and the roles of participants are clear or have been made clear. New contexts can be summer schools for PhD students, like ESERA’s one, where every student thinks about the same topic but with his/her own expertise or transdisciplinary activities are carried out, like asking students to play the role of a science journalist. A third space can be, for example, locations or hubs for innovation, or even primary teacher education institutes.
Scaffolding a “trading zone” as a safe third space deserves special attention since experiencing interdisciplinarity implies accepting and managing uncertainty, ambiguity, openness, insecurity and feelings of discomfort. To scaffold a safe third space, a solid plan for discussion - a “choreography” - must be designed and consistently managed by a facilitator.
This means that, when the roles and the structure for discussion are not clearly determined by the specificity of the context itself, the principles and “rituals to embrace the ambiguity of interdisciplinarity” need to be shared and implemented. Principles may include:
Rituals may include an activity for going out and coming back to the comfort zone, inspiring creativity and converging to the personal area of expertise.
-A complete report on this topic is part of Deliverable 4.1-
Concerning moods and attitudes, three aspects can make the difference in an interdisciplinary context, and therefore, turn knowledge exchange into a pleasing experience: to adopt an “acceptance” and/or a “recognizing/valuing” mood.
Acceptance concerns a variety of dimensions:
An idea that produced a great resonance in the study group was realising that interdisciplinarity in STEM means more than managing tensions, it also considers managing balance. What are the tensions that we are talking about? Tensions between belonging and not belonging, defining or negotiating meanings, going in or out of a comfort zone, zooming in and zooming out - from details to big pictures and vice versa.
By managing balance, we mean managing a particular kind of equilibrium between what we call “sense-making skills” -systems, critical, analytical thinking- and “strange-making skills” -creative, imaginative, anticipative thinking.
Accepting the intellectual risk, embracing ambiguity and managing the equilibrium between “sense-making and strange-making skills" appear as interesting “constructs” that will be further elaborated during the second year of the project and will orient the design of instructional materials, being also the bridge to elaborate on our main research goals: to outline forms of knowledge organisation and participation that foster interdisciplinarity.
As for accepting the risk, questions like the following need to be addressed:
Embracing ambiguity is a key concept in design-thinking methodology and, together with accepting the risk, is considered a strategic skill for leadership and for becoming a successful professional (see, e.g. IDEO).
In FEDORA these constructs need to be re-conceptualized so as to orient science education to become a context to “form people able to navigate the complexity of the society of acceleration and uncertainty” (and not only to “train high performant and successful professionals”). The equilibrium between sense-making and strange-making skills is particularly interesting to be explored since it acknowledges the tension between disciplinary identities and inter-disciplinarity.
In FEDORA, disciplines and their epistemic cores are considered crucial to guide the students to make and consolidate “structured” educational experiences. Such experiences represent a solid ground that is needed to develop “sense-making” skills and from which a student can take up the process of crossing the boundaries and developing strange-making skills.
