Encouraging creative synergisms and interdisciplinary adventure - for education & industry

The science and arts divide

Good artists understand empirical methods, the properties of different materials, the importance of planning and rigour as well as any laboratory scientist. Equally, good scientists engage in deep reflection, imaginative exploration and recognise the value of being expressive and communicating engagingly. And if experiment design itself isn’t a creative activity, what is? Despite their complementary dimensions, starting from school it often feels like science is science, and art is art, and ‘never the twain shall meet’.

Secondary schools, in particular, are vulnerable to creating impenetrable walls between subjects because their teachers have gained degrees in universities where the divisions between sciences and arts, maths and humanities, are frequently greater than vast oceans or epic mountain ranges. Our whole education system encourages specialisation (1). There have been moves to encourage interdisciplinary research but this remains to large extent at post-graduate level. In September ‘Nature’ published a special edition - “Why interdisciplinary research matters - Scientists must work together to save the world” – drawing attention to the benefits of natural and social scientists working together but also exploring the problems of finding funding (2).

In school there are even fewer incentives for interdisciplinary endeavours. Teachers are already pushed to the limit in terms of their time. When would they even begin to be able to sit down and share ideas with colleagues from other subjects? School leaders are pressured to gear every hour of in-school time towards meeting the key outcome targets, primarily GCSE results. It’s often suggested that the sooner you start preparing students for these qualifications, the better. Consequently, even Key Stage 3 teaching becomes colonized by a narrow curriculum focus.

But there is a huge lack of vision in this approach and an inadequate understanding of how deep learning develops and how students acquire skills. Last year the Guardian reported on research looking at the success of digital companies in Brighton. Those companies which valued equally the role of arts graduates and technology graduates were growing three times faster than companies where the skills base was not “superfused”. Success was not about having or not having skills within the company, it was the extent to which very different kinds of skills were respected (3).

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“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”

John Dewey

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Beyond knowledge divisions

Why aren’t academic disciplines all we need? “Discipline” derives from Latin disciplina meaning "instruction given, teaching", it came to be understood as the rule for a particular practice of behaviour and as the body of understanding related to a subject. Academic disciplines help us condense knowledge and understand how it has evolved in a particular field. There is huge value to this and with the efficiencies of the specialist language also developed. But as effective disciplines may be at introducing a person to a body of knowledge and how to work within it, they were never created as a means of arriving at new knowledge. They are very ineffective at discovery and adventure (4).

Imagine the world was still unknown beyond your country’s borders. Two people wanted to explore the unknown. One took only what he had found helpful for travelling and surviving in your homeland? The other tried to imagine different kinds of terrain and environmental conditions and prepared according those envisaged scenarios? She spent weeks seeking to recall stories of what were thought by her colleague as mere fantasies and myths. The first explorer left the flat, dry land of his home to perish on the rain swept mountain escarpment at the frontier to the new. His fellow adventurer seemed to make slower progress, but she was able to successfully cross the mountain range to the new lands beyond.

Schools need to provide more opportunities for interdisciplinary enquiry based study. Personally, I think it should be compulsory. And secondary teachers, in particular, should have a least one whole teacher training day a year where they map their curriculums to the wall and explore synergisms, design collaborations and plan enquiry based learning projects. Technology opens up huge possibilities to help facilitate this. Equipping young people with skills to explore effectively, whatever the terrain, is not wasted learning time. Even looked at solely through the prism of examination results, we see that higher grade assessment descriptors expressly require or strongly imply personal engagement, new insights and knowledge drawn from different sources (5).

Finally, what can other organisations do? If I’m arguing that students need to complement subject learning with interdisciplinary enquiry, then in the work place too individuals must be encouraged to understand how other departments work, collaborate and investigate. A culture of learning is needed which helps to equip people with the dispositions to meaning-make, creatively imagine and curiously explore. We are all heading for the unknown shores of the future. Those who have learnt to imagine, synergise and enquire will survive, the rest will be left on a bleak barren beach.

Nigel Newton is a consultant and educational researcher working to help organisations and individuals realise their potential - https://www.elli.global/elli

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Notes

(1) Professor Athene Donald, University of Cambridge, recently discusses the unhelpful divide, particularly in relation to post-16 education. A short piece by here can be found here: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/post-16-education-must-be-reformed-to-tackle-damaging-arts-science-divide

(2) Elsewhere I have written more theoretically about interdisciplinary epistemology: https://www.academia.edu/1572387/Michael_Polanyi_s_theory_of_knowledge_Habermas_and_interdisciplinary_research

 (3) There’s a great article by Andy Homden in which he writes about C21st creativity. He describes the founder of the Institute of Bio-medical Engineering at Imperial College, London, Professor Chris Toumazou: “…he senses that creative solutions arising from profound insight come not from the meeting of like minds, but from the meeting of unlike minds.” A great description of interdisciplinary thinking. Full article @ https://consiliumeducation.com/itm/2015/04/05/21st-century-creativity/

 (4) It’s interesting to remember that the name “university” is the abbreviation of the title ‘universitas magistrorum et scholarium’ community of masters and scholars. Although students in medieval universities followed a curriculum, there is evidence that the idea of community provided more impetus to what we would see now as interdisciplinary speculation and investigation.

(5) I can see the relationship between the importance of developing better interdisciplinary learning skills and the need to build evaluative and interpretative capabilities. My article on C21st skills points in this direction: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/analysis-interpretation-good-judgement-21st-century-skills-newton