Sights and signs of transdisciplinarity

Abstract

Recent critical literature on science and art education highlights a shift from engagement with disciplinary canons toward expansive, equity-oriented disciplinarity. Efforts to integrate the science and art disciplines, especially under the acronym STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math), have not sufficiently engaged with such within-discipline critique. Left unchallenged, proposals for disciplinary integration cannot meet the transformative potential to which they aspire. Therefore, this 3-paper dissertation adopts an anti-colonial lens to explore conceptualizations of art and science inter- and transdisciplinarity as a collection of interconnected stories of disciplinary reimaginings. Drawing from multiple theories and methods, this dissertation aims to demonstrate the possibilities of transdisciplinarity conceptually, methodologically, practically, and personally. The first paper critically examines current discourse trends that mention transdisciplinarity efforts in K-12 schools, specifically in curricular activity that seeks to expand science learning through the arts. It offers a critique against flattened ways of being and knowing present in schooling and aims to put forward considerations for critical and creative transdisciplinary curriculum development. The second paper presents a vertical case study that investigates how the purposes of art and science transdisciplinarity are defined by multi-level actors: from the macro national and city policy level to that at the microlevel of an art and science museum. Using critical discourse analysis alongside Bakhtin’s concepts of centrifugal and centripetal forces, this study identifies how the purpose of transdisciplinary learning is reproduced and reimagined through discourse at multiple scales. Tensions arose in the pull of how transdisciplinarity was conceptualized, particularly between board members and staff who felt different responsibilities for aligning with national discourse. Finally, the third paper is an autoethnographic study weaving together personal narrative, theory in the arts and cultural studies, and student work from one summer art and science program. Grappling with the art/science disciplinary dichotomy, this last paper troubles framings of the human-nature divide through material inquiry into place. In the discourse of critique and iterative making, the class community follows one student’s movement in a relational encounter with an ant as a disruption of enduring dualisms that signify Cartesian logic.