Teacher and student enactments of a transdisciplinary art-science-computing unit
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Teacher and student enactments of a transdisciplinary art‑science‑computing unit Lila Finch1 · Celeste Moreno1 · R. Benjamin Shapiro2 Received: 9 December 2019 / Accepted: 6 June 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Transdisciplinary learning environments have potential to bring together the arts, sciences, and computing within schools. We investigate the student and teacher enactment of sensemaking practices that break down disciplinary silos. We describe a pedagogical approach, Luminous Science, where students make dynamic, computationally-rich artistic representations of data from a classroom garden. Then we present an analysis of students’ sensemaking practices used during the transdisciplinary unit in three cases of art, science and computing classrooms. Qualitative analysis of a student group and teachers’ curricular materials in each of these classrooms elucidates how teachers’ enactment choices, organization, and facilitation of the unit we co-designed with them facilitated opportunities for students’ transdisciplinary thinking and learning. We show that when teachers’ enactments supported increased computational complexity and ties between artifact and phenomenon, then students participated in deeper transdisciplinary sensemaking. We discuss the implications for the design of curricular materials and professional development to support effective organization and discourse practices by teachers in orchestrating transdisciplinary sensemaking. Keywords Transdisciplinary · Sensemaking · Art education · Computer science education · Science education · Educational innovation
Introduction “Art has more imagination and science has more logic”—Student, before participating. Research on disciplinary integration, particularly in higher education, has shown many benefits of bringing the disciplines together, including: advancing understandings of complex phenomena (Boix-Mansilla 2006; Krakauer 2011; Nicolescu 2005), surfacing different disciplinary values (Carolan 2008), and encouraging methodological pluralism (Stein * Lila Finch [email protected] 1
University of Colorado Boulder (ATLAS Institute), Boulder, CO, USA
2
University of Colorado Boulder (Computer Science), Boulder, CO, USA
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et al. 2008). Following these findings, we are excited by the potential of learning experiences that deeply integrate the arts, science, and computing and that could expand the richness of students understandings of physical phenomena—observable occurrences in the universe (NGSS Lead States 2013), the types of practices valued, and methods used within schools. We feel compelled by the ways in which transdisciplinary learning can support reimagining and working toward implementation of learning environments that expand the ways students learn to know, be, and do in the world. There is a hierarchy of depth of disciplinary integration which we define here as follows: Multidisciplinary is a basic awareness of knowledge, values, and practices of a different discipline with t
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