Interdisciplinary Learning

Education, along with the rest of the world is currently in a state of exponential development. With new technologies driving this growth, educators must adapt to ensure they are on the cutting edge of technological understanding to give maximum benefit to current students.

It is easy to think about Interdisciplinary learning as something that is developed with the sole intent to benefit our students, however as shown in the Mindlabs own programmes it is current teachers who can benefit the most through their own Interdisciplinary Learning.

Today’s students are proficient at multi-tasking, whether this be in using digital technologies or interactivity online. Their entire existence has been digitally driven, with devices in hands, in bags, at home, in the classroom, as a leisure activity and a learning resource.

In comparison many teachers own existence have been vastly different, often filled with memories of playing outside after school, where watching TV was reserved for Sunday night movies and their experience of technology has been in many cases resistive and difficult.

With NZ Governments Communities of Online Learning (COOLs) receiving backlash from the NZ Education Council for not stating teaching must be ‘registered’, I often come back to postulating whether todays ‘registered’ teachers are in fact the best for today’s students.

We believe that teacher registration will improve the learning of students, but does this hold in today's digital environment, where even new teachers often lack the required digital  Interdisciplinary skills, resulting in ‘reactive’ programmes such as the Mindlabs Digital and Collaborative Learning.

Is this a case of the Gap-Generation (J. Bus, 2012), where technology has developed at such a rate that those graduating teacher training colleges, lack the fundamental digitally integrated, cross disciplinary skills needed for new students.

This raises the question of whether the MindLab itself will be disrupted.

When will the required interdisciplinary learning for teaching, such as digital, social, programming, robotics etc be integrated into the actual teacher training programmes and become a requirement of registration, rather than continuing to be the reactionary “patch-job” currently taken.

Interdisciplinary Learning has much to offer and it’s immediate adoption within teacher training will ensure our teachers are at least on-par with students they are responsible to teach in today’s digital playing field.

J. Bus et al. (2012), The Evolution of the Digital Divide, Digital Enlightenment Yearbook 2012, IOS Press, doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-057-4-57