Transdisciplinarity And Art Integration

In reading Julia Marshall’s(2014) article, titled Transdisciplinarity and art integration: Toward a new understanding of art-based learning across the curriculum, I was introduced to some educational concepts for teaching across the curriculum that I had not previously considered. The article itself was heavy with terminology and much of my time reading it was spent trying to make reasonable sense of the content so that I could form my own opinions about how she proposed we, as educators, should proceed when utilizing art integration. Marshall (2014) suggested that if we are to be successful to our goal of making learning more “dynamic, integrated and meaningful for students” (p.121), a structured framework for transdisciplinary art integration

This fusion leads to a higher level of thinking and learning across disciplines and helps students in making associations on multiple content levels.

As an art educator, my big question was how does a school implement this theory for education? Marshall reported that applying concept-based and process-based art integration methodologies that connect content knowledge, and individual and social issues to art forms, artistic thinking, art processes and creativity provides the framework. Process-based art integration fosters inquiry-based thinking and reflective learning instead of mere rote learning and can be multimodel art-based learning to teach other subject

Making meaning from learning happens all the time in my visual arts classroom and I can see how inquiry into ones own process, research, planning and critiquing can be useful across the curriculum to achieve the goal of meaningful, personal learning. I have also seen how studying poetry in the art room has helped to form the mental imagery necessary to start the planning process from making meaningful artwork. But, in my experience, there is a lack of a framework and much of this integration happens by small conversation from one teacher to another, not on a school-wide scale. What I think Marshall could have provided for us is a clearer idea of what the structured framework should or could look like if implemented, in a way that is understandable to educators of all