What does Interdisciplinary mean?
Interdisciplinary embodies a crossover between several disciplines. Artists and educators who take advantage of new media and materials develop employable skills like adaptability, open-mindedness, self-management, problem-solving and resilience.
Our contemporary way of life suggests that knowledge should be broad rather than thorough, or ideally, both. Being connected and informed on any subject has never been easier, so much that it makes us restless rather than satisfied.
Surely there are specific disciplines that specialize like painters who only paint and sculptors who make sculptures? Ever since the role of an artist was to be less crafty and more intellectual, artists have been exploring different media and wandering across disciplines. In the end, even the painters who only paint would have to be completely cut out from the world if they truly wished to make an artwork untouched by other disciplines.
Transdisciplinary (meaning across and beyond) artists like Olufar Eliasson blend all the pieces of knowledge and skill together, and create art that we cannot define through the canons that specify genres as we know them. His approach to creation is an approach that many of us can bring to our educational practices.
CONSIDER: Check out Olufar’s website.
What is a Transdisciplinary approach in education?
An approach to curriculum integration that dissolves the boundaries between the conventional disciplines and organizes teaching and learning around the construction of meaning in the context of real-world problems or themes.
TOTALLY WORTH A READ: Transdisciplinarity and Art Integration Toward a New Understanding of Arts Based Learning Across Curriculum.
CONSIDER: How could you bring the work of Mark Dion into your classroom subjects? How does his work provide cross-curricular connections?
And this FYI:
What do I know about Interdisciplinary art?
I know that it’s my favourite art-making method and that it the most effective way to connect my viewers to the larger community. I know that over the past 20 years of art-making, it has been the most engaging form of artwork I have been able to create as it can exist anywhere in the public realm and is not held back by but rather is brought to life by the communities it reaches and speaks for.
I know that for a long time I tried to wrap my head around why we separated our ways of knowing into separate disciplines that we were taught in school and that it didn’t make a lot of sense when it came to life outside of school. It always felt like we should integrate all of our learning into how life was lived, into a cohesive pattern of ebbs and flows, just like the natural world we are part of. As a student from a very early age, I would get so frustrated in how little we talked about the history of math or the art of science. As I grew older, it seemed even more ridiculous than the way I learnt to read could only find value in classes like English yet not as valued as I wondered about biological processes. It wasn’t until I became a full-time artist that I began to learn about interdisciplinary ways of knowing, learning and making.
In my first year of art school, my education began to mimic my life, and the boundaries that once separated disciplines became a fluid stream of knowing. It was this kind of education that brought me back to the field of education. I became determined to understand why we were still teaching from a very early age a disjointed way, subject base way of knowing. I learnt the history and became very determined to offer teachers a new way of seeing their world and thereby inviting them to interpret curriculum execution in a more holistic way. Enter Arts Education.
Interdisciplinary artists and art educators are an extremely valuable way of introducing your students to blended learning, lived experience and endless possibilities while still providing the structure that children (and adult) learners desire. These professionals are able to blur the lines of discipline distinction in such beautiful ways that they open the doors to interpretation and make room for the educator to bring their own lived experiences into that interpretation. They build community in the classroom that extends beyond the classroom/school walls. They invite their audiences to become students and teachers equally and task each participant to make meaning, share meaning and create novel experiences beyond the curriculum.
A great place to start
Performance Art:Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be live, through documentation, spontaneously or written, presented to a public in a Fine Arts context, traditionally interdisciplinary.
New Genre Public Art: The term was coined by the American artist, writer and educator Suzanne Lacy in 1991, to define a type of public art that was not a sculpture situated in a park or a square.
Check out Ed Woodham and his ongoing project Art in Odd Places (or here Art in Odd Places)
Social practice artists and producers aim to affect their community and environment in a real (rather than symbolic) way that enables social and political change. Each project is tailored to the community and environment in which it will take place.
Ten Artists on what Social Practice means to them
Activist Art:
Activist art is about empowering individuals and communities and is generally situated in the public arena with artists working closely with a community to generate the art.
Landbased/Environmental Artists: