TRANSFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY & TRANSDISCIPLINARITY

Thinking about university teaching, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, “The Justification for the university is that it preserves the connection between zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.” Whitehead believed that a real pedagogy ought to be a transformative pedagogy. Henry Giroux argues that our task in implementing a transformative pedagogy is to prepare the learner to cope with complexity of the world, prosper in it, and positively contribute to it. Indeed, we live in the most complex time of our (human) history, and with this complexity we are faced with new epistemological challenges. The liquid times, as Zygmunt Bauman calls the current era, with its demand of rethinking everything presents us with increasingly complex applications of understandings and perpetually expanding possibilities for interpretation. I should like to add that the “real” world is comprised of instability, ambiguity, contestability, and dynamic change. Within such a complex context there is a paramount need for a pedagogy that fosters learning experiences that enable both the learner and the educator (co-learner) to act purposefully and make this planet a better place to live. The old reductive/disjunctive approach to learning has been a mixed bag of failures and successes. But the traditional approach never brought us to what Basarab Nicolescu calls the golden age. Many thinkers who steadfastly cling onto the reductive/disjunctive tradition have been calling for a social revolution to return us to the imagined golden age. However, as Nicolescu points out there was never any golden age to begin with. He pointedly argues that even if one supposes that a Golden Age existed in time immemorial, such a return would have to be accompanied by an inner revolution of dogmatism, the mirror image of the social revolution. A transformative pedagogy will require a practice in transdisciplinarity. In the 21st century we can easily distinguish several hundreds of disciplines from one another and posit that the relentless specialization will lead to even more specific disciplines. This condition has brought us to a new paradigm. This new paradigm requires new pedagogical inquires resulting in new approaches, namely, multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Multidisciplinarity is the approach that requires studying a particular entity in several disciplines at the same time. The field of “media studies” is particularly prone to this approach as most media are polyvalent. The interdisciplinary approach attempts to create an infusion of disciplines to borrow knowledge and methodology from each other, resulting in new synthesis that could potentially generate new disciplines. One example is the dialectic between mathematics and physics, which has created the discipline of “mathematical physics.”

The above approaches are effective but limited. In other words, with multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity there exists one dominant discipline that is in the center of knowledge production. As Gregory Bateson taught us, transdisciplinarity is a creative process in ways of which the inquirer, informed by certain epistemological assumptions, challenges knowledge production and its organization. In the context of pedagogy, this will require a creative inquiry that is both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. Finally, I would have to agree with Bateson, “transdisciplinarity is more or less a promise.” So, to be a bit  Derridaean, I am talking about the possibility of an impossiblity.