What does it mean to become a transdisciplinarian? It's a journey about building bridges, crossing boundaries, and those important moments in our lives when we can either choose to compartmentalize or connect.
Shamini Dias talks with Andrew Vosko about growing up in a Catholic-Buddhist-Muslim culture in Malaysia and being educated at the National University of Singapore, which combined the arts and social sciences in one faculty. Her academic background includes education in anthropological linguistics, semiotics, and early modern literature, while her artistic endeavors included mime, theater, and improvisation as well as writing, painting, and collage.
An expert in pedagogy from K-12 to university and graduate school, Shamini talks about the sharp drop-off of artistic identities in grade school: By the sixth grade, once enthusiastic youngsters are embarrassed to say they are artists and have grown fearful of play and risk-taking. Her work in arts integration then involves bringing art, all kinds of arts—theater, drama, painting, collage—into, for example, the science classroom.
Andrew and Shamini consider the question of “play as privilege" and discuss multiple approaches to transdisciplinarity, including that being explored at CGU, focused on questions of equity and justice.
Integration is finding common ground, or what Basarab Nicolescu called the “included middle.”
Andrew notes that the “trans” in transdisciplinary stands for three things: transcending a discipline, transforming oneself, and transgressing orthodoxy.
Andrew and Shamini consider the future of the academy and the potential of transdisciplinary thought to transform higher education – to become, perhaps, the new liberal arts for the 21st century.
