Week 31 - APC - Professional Context - Crossing boundaries and creating connections (Class notes)

One of the most important skills you will need to learn is to become “self-aware” as a teaching professional and to understand the context of your own discipline: it’s strengths and its limitations. When you can clearly define our actions as a teaching practitioner and the context of your practice you will able to move across disciplines to other areas of practice where you can make informed contributions on the practice of your own current and future practice along with emerging practice disciplines.

Working in an interdisciplinary manner does not mean disregarding individual disciplines. It requires the practitioner to have a rigorous grounding and understanding of their discipline and its relationship to other practices. Every discipline has its own intellectual history and future. Every discipline has a unique perspective about its subject matter, its own epistemology, unique methodologies and methods of research. Each discipline also has unique methods and techniques in practice.

To work across disciplinary boundaries you will need to understand key elements as they are represented within each discipline. You will need to understand how the community of practitioners and scholars who i) pursue the creation of new knowledge in a discipline, ii) who teaches and practices within that discipline iii) operate in the context of the discipline; and the communities that the discipline serves.

Interdisciplinary practice allows individuals who are based in their practice discipline(s) to focus on collaboration and participate in finding solutions to the increasingly complex problems occurring in the world today. When working in an interdisciplinary manner we need to draw on multiple perspectives, practices, epistemologies and methodologies to identify how these can be utilised to solve real world problems.

Suggested Readings:

• Mathison,S.. & Freeman, M.(1997). The logic of interdisciplinary studies. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, 1997. Retrieved from http://www.albany.edu/cela/reports/mathisonlogic12004.pdf: This review of literature of interdisciplinary studies can help you explore more about the interdisciplinary approach used by teachers in their class.
• Jones, C.(2009). Interdisciplinary approach - Advantages, disadvantages, and the future benefits of interdisciplinary studies. ESSAI, 7(26), 76-81. Retrieved from http://dc.cod.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1121&context=essai

Activity 7: My interdisciplinary connection map

After reading the Class Notes, create a blog post where you first draw a map which demonstrates your current and potential interdisciplinary connections. You can choose to create your map with a digital tool (for example: bubbl.us, coggle, popplet.com...) or draw with pen and paper and submit a picture to the portal.

Identify two of the potential connections from your map as your near future goal(s). Then critically discuss the benefits and challenges of working in a more interdisciplinary environment.