Promoting Transdisciplinary Epistemic Dialogue

• In Event: Critical and Emergent Perspectives on Transdisciplinarity in Learning

Abstract

Objectives

STEM education is currently segregated by discipline and even when transdisciplinary learning is designed, as in integrated STEM education, disciplinary learning opportunities often are lost in the resulting mix (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council, 2014). Recent efforts to improve instruction in STEM disciplines emphasize a turn toward practice, positioning students to participate in approximations of the epistemological means by which STEM professionals generate and revise knowledge. With these epistemological means in mind, I suggest that students participate in shared practices across disciplines in ways that reveal common means of making and revising knowledge, but where students also grapple with how these common means participate in disciplinarily distinctive ontologies. The anticipated effect is a form of interdisciplinary dialogue that expands the learning space to include reflection on disciplined differences in the production and revision of knowledge, even as the co-mingling of common forms of practice amplifies the learner’s grasp of each discipline.

Modes of Inquiry and Theoretical Framework

Two illustrative cases of students’ experiences of transdisciplinary in mathematics and in sciences are described. The first case considers young children’s (grade 2, 3) years-long participation in practices of representational re-description in both mathematics and sciences. In mathematics, children invented and contested ways of representing and coordinating measured quantities. The ontological status of these representational systems was governed by relations of necessity (e.g., children decided that all points on a line in a Cartesian graph represented the same ratio between quantities, such as the circumference and height of collections of cylinders). These representational means were re-deployed in sciences to characterize material kind and growth, providing new ways for children to conceive of these natural systems by representing them. However, the ontological status of the representational systems was now governed by that of the approximation inherent in modeling natural systems. Nevertheless, this ontological tension was productive in that modeling natural systems instigated further innovation and extension of children’s s mathematical systems, which continued to be governed by necessity. For instance, to accommodate the need to compare three quantities simultaneously to characterize the growth of plant roots and shoots, children proposed expanding the Cartesian system from one quadrant to two, albeit in unconventional ways. The second case describes how sixth-graders engaged in the practice of modeling the variability of data generated by diverse variability-generating processes. Modeling afforded imaginative grasp of how different variability-generating processes could be conceptualized as instances of similar conceptual systems. The approximate ontology of modeling also promoted transformation in the mathematical logic of a sample, initially taken as a part-whole, as necessarily hierarchical, simultaneously representing a particular set of outcomes and as one of an infinite number of possible sets of outcomes that could be generated.

Warrants for Arguments/Point of View and Scholarly Significance

Participating in common practices across multiple disciplines amplified learning within each discipline, yet also provided students with opportunities for first-hand experience of disciplinarily distinctive ontologies. These experiences grounded substantive, student-generated epistemic dialogues in which a productive tension between approximation and necessity emerged.

Author

• Richard Lehrer, Vanderbilt University