Unroughening diamonds: FACET learning for five-faced transdisciplinary success
Rough diamonds gain value via their intentional cut, their purposeful facets. Brilliance shines through each facet integrated into the next. Likewise, learning is enriched by a five-faced FACET comprising: Fundamentals, Attractivity, Commitment, Engagement, and Transdisciplinarity. This presentation calls upon administrators, faculty, staff, and students to engage in a new pentagonal process of change where curricular boundaries are struggling to hold fast while simultaneously disintegrating. The presentation proceeds through five overlapping phases: First, the five features of FACET are defined. Second, they are exemplified. Third, they are integrated into each other. Fourth, they are noted as more than “cross-curricular,” as evident in educational institutions from Utrecht to Australia, passing through Canada and California, and through technologies as old as art and literacy education and as new as the Internet and AI.
It will be demonstrated through practical examples how subject-matter fundamentals can be taught in attractively engaging ways through teachers committed to reaching across monocurricular barriers to share style and substance, accepting expertise from intelligence communities not only real and campus-based but artificial and untethered from the real.
Katherine Watson, Santiago Canyon College, US
Dr. Watson has been teaching French, English, English as a Foreign Language, anthropology, linguistics, and zoosemiotics for more than half a century outdoors among farmworkers, in brick-and-mortar classrooms, via television, and online. Her “French Topics” was the first totally-online course offered in California, she co-created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s first online adjunct to a telecourse, and her research ranges from teaching and learning to animal communication, with an emphasis on transdisciplinarity.
