*Space* All pedagogical activity takes place within space, some physical institutions, some are liminal observations and others are digital environments, however the locale directly informs the type of education experience created. Transdisciplinary education, in its effort to dismantle disciplinary boundaries, must also dismantle the boundaries that often separate pedagogical environments and the spaces they rest…
*Slow* Transdisciplinary education is not built for efficiency or speed. With collaboration at its core, it is a cumbersome affair, if not at times unwieldy. Rather than being a hindrance, it is an affordance, a means of engaging wholly in complexity. To borrow from the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers: It is here that the word…
*Scale* The dominant problems of the contemporary moment are transnational, effecting planetary systems and the plural biotic, abiotic and metabiotic actors that make up this world.1 One of the goals of Euromodernity was to render the Universal legible, a goal that involved standardisation, classification, categorisation, and homogenisation.2 Through these processes, scalable methodologies aimed to be…
*Possibility* In Hermès V, Michel Serres speaks of the Northwest Passage, the sea route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.1 It is a place where the earth, sky, and water alternately melt and freeze together. As the seasons turn, the passage appears and disappears again; the archipelago breathes. This means that when we want to navigate…
*Listening* One of the challenges within transdisciplinary teaching and learning is fostering safe and brave spaces for speaking and listening. 1 When collaborating, it is easy for communication to collapse into a simple game of relay where you say this and I say that. Inevitably, the soundscape can be rapidly filled with disparate opinions and,…
*Failure* ‘Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world’. 1 Transdisciplinary education at its most counter-hegemonic, deconstructs what James C. Scott terms ‘legibility’. Scott defines legibility as being the disciplinary specific need for standardisation and uniformity…
*Conflict* “Conflict, though often unsettling, is a natural part of collective human experience. It can leave participants ill at ease, so it is often avoided and suppressed. Yet conflict, when well-managed, breathes life and energy into relationships and can cause individuals to be more innovative and productive. Conflict is present within our schools whether we…
*Collaboration* …at stake (…) are the effective conditions of an encounter, not the recognition of submission. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics II. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. In Cosmopolitics II, Isabelle Stengers writes about the figure of the diplomat. The diplomat is sent to establish or maintain a (diplomatic) relationship. On the one hand, this means she…
While the word care conjures Edenic images of peace and selfless acts of altruism, through various conversations and workshops we conducted, a more complicated understanding emerged and especially within the framework of transdisciplinary teaching.
*Assessment* “to be in but not of (…) the university” Stefano Harney & Fred Moten In The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten speak of the subversive intellectual. 1 Unable to accept that the university is a place of enlightenment and simultaneously unable to deny that it is also a place of refuge, she develops…