Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Interdisciplinary  Collaboration

It takes a village to raise a child.

Each group on our interdisciplinary map has a role to play in supporting teachers and students in our school to achieve our school vision.

Our learning community will be lifelong learners empowered to use all the key competencies to shine in a range of contexts with their voice, agency, and identity.

The current situation for the teachers and learners in our school is that we are now learning through play, projects, problem-solving and our passions. (We call it PBL)

We learn through inquiring into a problem that is often linked to the students’ passions and involves learning through play. With this change in pedagogy we are finding that teachers and students really need support from people outside of our school staff.

At all stages of the inquiry process we now realise that we need ‘experts’ from ‘the real world’ with knowledge, skills and access to resources that will support us to solve our inquiry problems.

 Before we start our inquiries we offer workshops to the students that they can ‘opt into’, if they have an interest in the particular topic being covered. These workshops cover a wide range of topics and contexts for learning and can be run by ‘experts’ who work with students in the school or out in our community.

The purpose of the workshops is to spark an interest, give students an introduction to a topic that they might want to inquire into and expose them to an experience they might not have had or we can’t provide. The workshops might provide an opportunity for students ‘ to shine’ in a learning area that they did not know they had the potential to excel in.

A trip to The Porirua City Council chambers
to develop the skills to be a 'person of influence'
for Year 8 students

A trip to learn how to create drama and film
it for students who had shown an interest in podcasting

Prior to this year, if individuals or groups had offered to work with our students we would have decided to take up the offer based whether what they were going to share had links with the topics of the inquiries we are doing. Now we take up the offer from anyone who we think will share knowledge, skills and values and who will provide experiences that may motivate us to learn more about a wide range of learning areas.

A parent supporting us to open Samoan Language Week in an appropriate way

A trip to Pataka Museum and Art Gallery to learn how to draw in a cubist style while engaged in and art inquiry

     

Students doing 3D modelling run by a teacher doing the MIndlab course

Scientist Dave (a retired lecturer from Victoria University) working with a group of students who chose to do this workshop

Sometimes we find it hard when the way that the ‘expert’ shares information, ideas or skills does not ‘fit’ with our pedagogy. But more often that not, because they are usually passionate about their area of expertise, the students respond by being interested and engaged. For example our Kapa Haka tutors are quite strict and ‘hard lines’ but the standard of our Kapa Haka Roopu is amazing!

While involved in inquiring into a problem, the students sometimes contact ‘experts’ in their community to support them with their learning, but we don’t do this anywhere near enough. We need to make decisions about who can support us when we are deciding possibilities, sorting information and ideas, taking action, finding out, making connections and going further with our inquiries.

When developing the success criteria we co-construct to establish what we need to do to achieve our purpose for learning we often wonder and try to decide "What does a mathematician/choreographer/ sportsperson etc do when they.....?" Using real people to provide this information is something really worthwhile for us to do.

When learning through play, problem solving and our passions we need to access a much wider range of ‘experts’, contexts for learning and resources to use as provocations than we have in the past. We will need to put thought and effort into doing this to enhance the learning experiences and facilitate opportunities to develop skills to ‘shine’ as 21st century learners