PRACTICE- PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT - CROSSING BOUNDARIES

PRACTICE - Professional Context - Crossing Boundaries

It is interesting to come across this part of the assessment in week 31, which I happened to research in 2007 with my prior experiences of working with a Danish Educational research and Consultant group in 2004. I presented and research paper proposing a curriculum integration in visual arts. My research looked at integrating various disciplines in Art, like Drama, Music, Painting, Design, Technology, Photography and the Media studies (Figure 1) just like the way Ross Institute integrated their learning into an open spiral. However, I see a possibility to extend this integration into connecting with Social Studies, History, English and science (Figure2). I am glad that New Zealand is beginning to consider this long pending research into the current learning system.

 

The issues that may be challenging for this to happen is the timetable of a school. Not many schools are willing to risk the change and try a new timetable that could accommodate this kind of interdisciplinary studies. The transition if at all one tries to implement has to be incremental and has to happen yearly. The other reason my research identified was the amount of teacher training that is required to prepare the teachers to adopt these innovative pedagogy. The possibility to understand the crossover and the implications of drawing other disciplinary connection is a risk that the MOE was not ready to take. This kind of curriculum may need some teacher who are skilled in multidisciplinary experiences. The current New Zealand Ministry of Education arts strategy (2003) states that: “The Arts develop the artistic and aesthetic dimensions of human experience. They contribute to our intellectual ability and to our social, cultural and spiritual understandings. They are an essential element of daily living and of lifelong learning.”  Integrated inquiry and learning have the potential for making learning at school more relevant and engaging, but what are the risks of losing discipline-based knowledge, and does it matter? Many schools are working hard to engage their communities, but does the wider community want to be involved in education? What opportunities does the community have to engage with future-focused ideas about education, and whose responsibility is this? These are a few questions I was engaged with in my research.

 

A learner-centred interactive interdisciplinary pedagogy is intended to draw a paradigm for arts education that has two similar, yet different, integrating points of inception. One is rooted in the indigenous concept of the art form embedded in cultures like those of Africa and Asia, while the other is identified in the modern educational psychoanalytical theory of multiple intelligences proposed by Howard Gardener (1999). Parallel kinds of integration are found in these two approaches – either between the disciplines or within an individual’s intellectual development. Interestingly, it is clear that these two approaches, integrated into a curriculum, would enable a discipline-based arts practice with an interdisciplinary outcome. On the one hand, art education models commonly arise out of the diversified streaming of disciplines with little or no interrelation (the European model), while on the other hand we have contemporary art practices which reflect interdisciplinary art concepts that are rooted in both indigenous and popular cultures.

 

The above considerations point to a paradigm for art in the curriculum which results in an integrated arts/crafts model given an important place, where painting, drawing, music, dance, drama, craft, design and technology are combined using a process approach, developing cognitive, affective, technical, aesthetic and social skills. This indigenous revolution includes a learner-centered education model with an education-for-all policy which could be identified as either “arts in culture” or “arts and culture” (Figure 3).This idea is to what Balkin (2013) saw as similar in the conventions of Law and Performance arts.

I can clearly see that what Mindlab is doing is exactly what the MOE need to adopt in its Teacher education programs nationwide. This might perhaps equip the future generation teacher with the skills required to perceive the multi-disciplinary vision in the education system.  

Ross Institute. (2015, July 5). Ross Spiral Curriculum: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Science. [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHZhkB0FJik

Learning Media, 2003. New Zealand Ministry of Education, Arts Curriculum Document, Wellington.

Gardner, H.  1999, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century, New York: Basic Books.

Balkin, Jack M., Verdi's High C (March 17, 2013). Texas Law Review, Forthcoming; Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 286. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2240496

 Figure 1: The spiral pathway reflecting Balkin’s theory of Integration and Howard Gardener’s theory of Multiple Intelligences. Courtesy: Eritrean Arts Education Curriculum Development Panel.

Figure 2: My possibility to integrate interdisciplinary and also multi-disciplinary curriculum.

Figure 3: Model of Balkins’ creative learning process suggesting collaborating individual discipline based activities into a single end performance outcome.