Moving towards transdisciplinarity: an ecological sustainable focus for science and mathematics pre-service education in the primary/middle years
Source: Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, Volume 36, Issue 1 February 2008 , pages 19 - 33
One reason we have difficulty finding sustainable solutions is in part because we are unable to see the bigger picture. Capra (2000) argues, “To become ecologically literate we must learn to think systemically - in terms of connectedness, context and processes” (p. 270). We have attempted to structure connected learning experiences through our transdisciplinary approach to teaching for learning science, mathematics and ecological aspects of society and environment. We support Jucker's (2002) view that we must have lateral rigor across disciplines and vertical rigor within disciplines in order to best prepare students for teaching.
This paper explores the theoretical underpinning of this complex approach to undergraduate teaching and reports on how our teaching team has worked collaboratively to structure a sequence of three, one semester integrated, core courses that explicitly uses an educating for ecological sustainability theme as the basis for each course and associated assessment