Abstract:

The crucial linkages between an understanding of global environmental impact, personal and community consumption and production, and creativity, are most significantly developed and enhanced by education as an ongoing process in people’s lives. Recent scientific evidence has clearly shown the need for urgent action on issues of socio-ecological sustainability and one that, I argue, requires new practices and methods to engage people on a deep level to develop their consciousness of sustainability issues. This paper explores the pressing requirement to develop interdisciplinary pedagogical practices to address socio-ecological sustainability for multiple higher education disciplinary contexts. It draws on the creative disciplines to help catalyse the conceptualisation of renewed pedagogical practices. While there is interdisciplinary expertise in Higher Education (HE), it is still on the fringes of mainstream HE, and bounded by discipline-based structures and practices. Pedagogies that explicitly link sustainability and interdisciplinarity are much less common (Jones, Selby, Sterling, 2010). This paper considers the use of creative practices to support dialogue around issues of sustainability, supported by technology enhanced learning. The role of social-emotional engagement and aesthetics is a key part of this process (Marshalsey, Sclater). There is growing recognition that the artistic forms of knowing contribute to our understanding of the increasingly complex world we inhabit and that human emotions play a critical role in this process. There is also recognition of the key contributions that the Arts can make to the research process (Sullivan 2006, 2010), in terms of methodological innovation, and in terms of providing a focus to support sustainability related explorations. The Arts and their methodologies can help us to understand, in a profound way, the world we live in and how we make meaning of it.

These are interdisciplinary challenges, and they require disciplinary experts to move beyond their expertise, to create new thinking, practices and approaches, that cut across domains. Nissani (1997) has argued that ‘Interdisciplinarity typically applies to four realms: knowledge, research, education, and theory’. Much pedagogical research involves the interlocking and overlapping, discontinuities and synthesis, of these four realms. In part, it is the interdisciplinary crossing over between them that drives the creation of fresh vision and new opportunities – the fundamental prerequisites to the building of creative, flexible and adaptable learning systems and environments. Interdisciplinarity, then, at its most basic, brings together the distinctive components of many disciplines (Nissani, 1997 p.203). Our recent research (Sclater & Lally 2016; Sclater 2016) has highlighted the need for novel and creative ways to mediate interdisciplinary communications to support collaborative working. We have also shown that creative practices can offer a powerful language for such collaborative communication mediated by technology (Lally & Sclater 2012, 2013; Sclater & Lally 2013, 2014).

The paper has two important questions: How can Technology Enhanced Learning support creative interdisciplinary communication around a shared goal? What are the important characteristics of an Interdisciplinary Learning Space that supports these creative practices in a focused interdisciplinary investigation?

Keywords:

Creativity, Technology Enhanced Learning, Interdisciplinarity, Sustainability.