The solutions to the environmental challenges we face depend on understanding issues with insights from multiple disciplines. Interdisciplinary learning involves two or more subject areas that are integrated to foster enhanced learning in each subject area. For example, bringing ideas from economics, science, and social studies to help develop climate solutions.
Transdisciplinary learning goes a step further by bringing multiple disciplines together to explore a complex issues like climate change in such a way as to create new knowledge and a deeper understanding of how to address the issues.
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Hi, I'm Joe Heimlich. I'm the Co-Director of the Center for Research and Evaluation at COSI, a large science center in Columbus, Ohio. I'm also a professor emeritus and a member of the Emeritus Academy at the Ohio State University, where I taught environmental education.
In disciplines, [there] are an arbitrary separation of knowledge bodies. And they were Greeks like this nice boxing of things. And so we have developed over centuries and centuries of perspective that learning is by different subjects.
Then the multidisciplinary means that we have pieces of different ones working toward a common solution. So we may look at a problem and we look at it through an economic lens, then we look at it through a social science lens, then we might look at it through a mathematical lens or a science lens and physical science lens.
Interdisciplinary means the problem cannot be answered by one discipline. And we have to have different disciplines, each using their tools to help us understand the problem so that we can address it. The coolest thing about environmental ed is that of transdisciplinary.
Transdisciplinary means that we use all the tools together instead of each field contributing. We answer the question concurrently with the different fields. So we look at history. We look at economics. We look at social benefits, social welfare, and social science. And we use all the different tools from all the sciences and social sciences and humanities to answer a question concurrently.
So I approach this from the perspective of a researcher. I geek out on research. I love doing research. But for the practitioner, I think it's really about understanding that our work is informed by theories from many, many disciplines. And we use all of those at the same time. So we teach transdisciplinarity. We can't talk about an environmental issue without understanding and bringing into the discussion, the history of the place or the history of the issue. We can't talk about how people interact without understanding the economic impact and bringing that into the discussion. We can't really talk about it without understanding the natural science or the physical science of the issue.
So when we teach, we're bringing in understandings from all these different disciplines, so that we are teaching in a transdisciplinary way. As environmental educators, we are usually operating in a transdisciplinary way.
And so when we say interdisciplinary, we're recognizing the separation of knowledge. And when we say what we do is transdisciplinary, we're talking about integration of the disciplinary knowledges.