BORDER CROSSINGS IN THE GEOGRAPHY OF KNOWLEDGE
Open your TV news channels on any given day, and you would most likely be tempted to turn it off very quickly, especially at the end of a long and tiring day. The world seems irredeemably afflicted by various wars and conflicts, not just between humans, but also between humans and the rest of nature. Yet we seem further away from solutions such as the Millennium Development Goals as we have ever been in our history. Horrible and depressing news seem to draw more media attention (and perhaps even audiences) than news that affirm our sense of well-being, connectedness with others and hope. Ironically, this comes after an entire century of boasting about the benefits of civilization, modernity, rationality and scientific progress.
What, if anything, does this portend for the state of knowledge in the 21st century? And what conclusions should we as educators and parents draw to design a viable world for our children and grandchildren?
These questions could easily be the subject of a UN Conference. But for now, I would like to tentatively outline a few changes that may permit succeeding generations to avoid the narrowness of vision and lack of compassion that characterize our times.
Misguided Specialist Interventions
Current educational systems have fostered disciplinary specialization at the expense of the ability to seek out broader connections between our ideas and their consequences for the ways we act in and on the world. Yet one of the effects of our many contemporary crises has been a growing suspicion of disciplinary expertise. Highly educated economists, political scientists, lawyers, scientists and academics, employed by influential global institutions and generously funded think tanks, have played a significant role in fueling and propelling some of these crises. Yet not only have there been well-publicized disagreements among experts in the same discipline on issues such as global recession or global warming, but it has been more common for each group of experts to propose solutions that ignored the insights of disciplines other than their own than it has been for experts from different disciplines to collaborate towards a solution. The result has been that the problems quickly became worse with each new set of expert interventions.
Take agriculture. The same pattern of misguided specialist intervention that has occurred in this field of knowledge and practice recurs in other areas as well. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, agriculture productivity was sought to be enhanced through agricultural engineering in the same way as industrial productivity, with little regard for ecological and other social effects over the longer term. The consequences have been remarkable short term increases in the productivity of various crops, and the prosperity of some farmers benefiting from the so-called “Green Revolution”. But the long term consequences for soil quality, depletion of water resources and a pandemic of indebtedness and poverty have been nothing short of catastrophic in many countries.
Does this pattern – of creating long term problems by seeking short term solutions – tell us anything about the way our mind works? The human mind seems to be a pattern-detecting machine that has evolved excellent mechanisms for inductive reasoning, but is not very good at deduction on the basis of complicated logical rules. Moreover, we cannot see very far into the future, and most of our long term predictions seem to go wrong, especially when they concern human affairs. Finally, the human mind needs to fragment and simplify the world because it is not designed to grasp the world in its wholeness. Try and imagine a map of Turkey that has a scale of 1 cm = 1 cm. It would be useless as a map, because it would simply be a replica of the territory itself. A more useful map would have a scale of 1 cm = 100 km. But because of the need for fragmenting our representations of the world to understand it, we tend to ignore what is left out of the fragments.
Disciplinary Knowledge and Education
What does all this mean for knowledge, and particularly for education? Are disciplines useless as ways of organizing knowledge? Should we stop teaching the main subjects that we have traditionally taught in schools? The answer to both the last two questions must be a firm negative, but I will try and argue for a curriculum that fosters greater emphasis on interdisciplinarity, and by deploying a geographical metaphor for disciplinary knowledge to argue for closer interactions and integration between different disciplines.
We need disciplines because they represent the historical and evolutionary accumulation of ways of understanding aspects of our world through concepts, theories connecting the concepts, and through the methods of investigation using the lenses provided by the concepts and theories. But because disciplines are necessarily mechanisms of selection, each discipline represents a fragment of reality. Disciplines would be useless if they failed to distinguish different aspects of reality. But by the same token, we need some way of re-integrating the pictures of the world that we create through the lenses of the disciplines.
Furthermore, disciplines include not only the knowledge represented by concepts and theories and data, and the methods and results of investigation, but also the social practices of its community of practitioners, their standards and norms for judging their own work, and the forms in which they express their knowledge. Each discipline thus resembles a country or culture, with its own peculiar ways of generating knowledge, and preserving, modifying and communicating it. The disciplines, like countries, also have their own borders, with neighboring disciplines (e.g., Physics and Chemistry) exhibiting similarities in their “landscape” and “culture”. Already we see the potential for new disciplines created through the reconfiguration of disciplinary borders, such as in fields like Cognitive Science, Business and Management, Cultural Studies, Media and Communication. These are already acknowledged as viable departments by many universities.
If we need to gain more integrated understandings of the world, then I would suggest that we should engage in more disciplinary border crossings. In high schools, courses could be organized according to themes and related projects, drawing in insights and techniques from various disciplines, such as
• Energy Use Patterns in Societies – (Physics, Sociology, Geography, Mathematics) Building a Knowledge Society (Sociology, Mathematics, Philosophy, Social Psychology, History)
• Resolving Conflicts and Building Peace (History, Philosophy, Politics, Anthropology)
• Science, Technology and Social Change (Physics/Chemistry/Biology, Sociology)
• Learning and Teaching in the Work Place (Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology)
• Building Energy-efficient Homes (Art, Physics/Biology/Chemistry, Mathematics)
• Engineering for Theatrical Productions (Art, Physics, Chemistry, Design Technology)
Interdisciplinary Work and Performance
Another way to promote greater interdisciplinarity could be to penetrate the boundaries between schools and the rest of society, especially the workplace. Students could be employed to investigate themes in more practically oriented projects which they would need to demonstrate and justify before disciplinary practitioners from businesses and disciplinary experts from academia. Experts and practitioners could also be invited to talk to students in schools. [Added this just now.]
Interdisciplinary work is not without its problems. Disciplines often differ in their standards of depth and rigor of treatment, with some placing much greater value on proofs and measurable certainty and others being satisfied with fuzzy approximations and heuristic procedures. It is therefore difficult to establish standards of interdisciplinary performance. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary work needs to integrate insights from the various disciplines rather than simply juxtapose them, and in a way that generates new understandings that would not have been available without the deployment of several disciplines. This is a demanding undertaking. Yet there are many good models of interdisciplinary work being done in all levels of school, starting from primary levels. We need to take advantage of them to re-orient our modes of learning and teaching for the 21st century.
What, if anything, does this portend for the state of knowledge in the 21st century? And what conclusions should we as educators and parents draw to design a viable world for our children and grandchildren?
These questions could easily be the subject of a UN Conference. But for now, I would like to tentatively outline a few changes that may permit succeeding generations to avoid the narrowness of vision and lack of compassion that characterize our times.
Misguided Specialist Interventions
Current educational systems have fostered disciplinary specialization at the expense of the ability to seek out broader connections between our ideas and their consequences for the ways we act in and on the world. Yet one of the effects of our many contemporary crises has been a growing suspicion of disciplinary expertise. Highly educated economists, political scientists, lawyers, scientists and academics, employed by influential global institutions and generously funded think tanks, have played a significant role in fueling and propelling some of these crises. Yet not only have there been well-publicized disagreements among experts in the same discipline on issues such as global recession or global warming, but it has been more common for each group of experts to propose solutions that ignored the insights of disciplines other than their own than it has been for experts from different disciplines to collaborate towards a solution. The result has been that the problems quickly became worse with each new set of expert interventions.
Take agriculture. The same pattern of misguided specialist intervention that has occurred in this field of knowledge and practice recurs in other areas as well. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, agriculture productivity was sought to be enhanced through agricultural engineering in the same way as industrial productivity, with little regard for ecological and other social effects over the longer term. The consequences have been remarkable short term increases in the productivity of various crops, and the prosperity of some farmers benefiting from the so-called “Green Revolution”. But the long term consequences for soil quality, depletion of water resources and a pandemic of indebtedness and poverty have been nothing short of catastrophic in many countries.
Does this pattern – of creating long term problems by seeking short term solutions – tell us anything about the way our mind works? The human mind seems to be a pattern-detecting machine that has evolved excellent mechanisms for inductive reasoning, but is not very good at deduction on the basis of complicated logical rules. Moreover, we cannot see very far into the future, and most of our long term predictions seem to go wrong, especially when they concern human affairs. Finally, the human mind needs to fragment and simplify the world because it is not designed to grasp the world in its wholeness. Try and imagine a map of Turkey that has a scale of 1 cm = 1 cm. It would be useless as a map, because it would simply be a replica of the territory itself. A more useful map would have a scale of 1 cm = 100 km. But because of the need for fragmenting our representations of the world to understand it, we tend to ignore what is left out of the fragments.
Disciplinary Knowledge and Education
What does all this mean for knowledge, and particularly for education? Are disciplines useless as ways of organizing knowledge? Should we stop teaching the main subjects that we have traditionally taught in schools? The answer to both the last two questions must be a firm negative, but I will try and argue for a curriculum that fosters greater emphasis on interdisciplinarity, and by deploying a geographical metaphor for disciplinary knowledge to argue for closer interactions and integration between different disciplines.
We need disciplines because they represent the historical and evolutionary accumulation of ways of understanding aspects of our world through concepts, theories connecting the concepts, and through the methods of investigation using the lenses provided by the concepts and theories. But because disciplines are necessarily mechanisms of selection, each discipline represents a fragment of reality. Disciplines would be useless if they failed to distinguish different aspects of reality. But by the same token, we need some way of re-integrating the pictures of the world that we create through the lenses of the disciplines.
Furthermore, disciplines include not only the knowledge represented by concepts and theories and data, and the methods and results of investigation, but also the social practices of its community of practitioners, their standards and norms for judging their own work, and the forms in which they express their knowledge. Each discipline thus resembles a country or culture, with its own peculiar ways of generating knowledge, and preserving, modifying and communicating it. The disciplines, like countries, also have their own borders, with neighboring disciplines (e.g., Physics and Chemistry) exhibiting similarities in their “landscape” and “culture”. Already we see the potential for new disciplines created through the reconfiguration of disciplinary borders, such as in fields like Cognitive Science, Business and Management, Cultural Studies, Media and Communication. These are already acknowledged as viable departments by many universities.
If we need to gain more integrated understandings of the world, then I would suggest that we should engage in more disciplinary border crossings. In high schools, courses could be organized according to themes and related projects, drawing in insights and techniques from various disciplines, such as
• Energy Use Patterns in Societies – (Physics, Sociology, Geography, Mathematics) Building a Knowledge Society (Sociology, Mathematics, Philosophy, Social Psychology, History)
• Resolving Conflicts and Building Peace (History, Philosophy, Politics, Anthropology)
• Science, Technology and Social Change (Physics/Chemistry/Biology, Sociology)
• Learning and Teaching in the Work Place (Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology)
• Building Energy-efficient Homes (Art, Physics/Biology/Chemistry, Mathematics)
• Engineering for Theatrical Productions (Art, Physics, Chemistry, Design Technology)
Interdisciplinary Work and Performance
Another way to promote greater interdisciplinarity could be to penetrate the boundaries between schools and the rest of society, especially the workplace. Students could be employed to investigate themes in more practically oriented projects which they would need to demonstrate and justify before disciplinary practitioners from businesses and disciplinary experts from academia. Experts and practitioners could also be invited to talk to students in schools. [Added this just now.]
Interdisciplinary work is not without its problems. Disciplines often differ in their standards of depth and rigor of treatment, with some placing much greater value on proofs and measurable certainty and others being satisfied with fuzzy approximations and heuristic procedures. It is therefore difficult to establish standards of interdisciplinary performance. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary work needs to integrate insights from the various disciplines rather than simply juxtapose them, and in a way that generates new understandings that would not have been available without the deployment of several disciplines. This is a demanding undertaking. Yet there are many good models of interdisciplinary work being done in all levels of school, starting from primary levels. We need to take advantage of them to re-orient our modes of learning and teaching for the 21st century.
Labels: Curriculum, Learning
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