Interdisciplinary
What is this? When beginning this weeks task I found it hard to understand what this was. When watching the videos and going through the class notes I found that its what we are now calling 'Innovative and Collaborative teaching'. According to Dictionary.com Interdisciplinary means combining two or more learning areas, for example science and maths.
My interdisciplinary connection map
As a primary school teacher we have to cover so much over a short space of time and the idea of collaboration or using Interdisciplinary isn't a new idea to us. In the video Interdisciplinarity and Innovation Education Dr. Deana McDoangh and Joyce Thomas talk about the different advantages and disadvantages of having and using interdisciplinary. I liked how they discussed how as teachers we help to develop our students to be able to understand their value to themselves and how they can contribute to society. Interdisciplinary talks about building better connections for students and that we as teachers can get stuck in 'one way' of thinking and teaching, but if we open our students to interdisciplinary ideas they can understand and become innovative. I understood and agreed with how Dr. Deana McDoangh talked about interdisciplinary isn't always easy, especially when it comes to how people think and feel about teaching, but as long as they are willing to build on come areas they help to build an awareness of this. I liked the table that Mathison and Freeman (1997) used, it gave a good understanding of the definitions surrounding 'collaboration'. It was interesting to see that intresting doesn't always mean collaborative.
In my own team we have been trying to collaborate and integrate as much as we can to try make it easier for us as teachers. Currently we do this for our team planning, each taking an area and planning for this and then it is left up to the individual teacher to interpret as much as they can for their class needs.
The potential interdisciplinary connection I am looking at making in my future is within my school we have just merged our Intermediate team with our Senior Team to be one. Overtime we are looking at merging our teaching to make things more collaborative across the two teams. We are looking at starting a discovery programme where teachers choose a strength they have (also based on the resources we have in the school), for example cooking, water safety, and coding, there is also some input from students about what they would like to learn about and then they all choose the area they would like to focus their learning on. Below I have tried to identify some of the advantages and disadvantages I think will happen with this.
References
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/interdisciplinary
Jones, C.(2009). Interdisciplinary approach - Advantages, disadvantages, and the future benefits of interdisciplinary studies. ESSAI7 (26), 76-81. Retrieved from http://dc.cod.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1121&context=essai
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:
ThomasMcDonaghGroup. ( 2011, May 13). Interdisciplinarity and Innovation Education.[video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDdNzftkIpA
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