Solvitur Ambulando: Interrupting Secondary English Literature Education Through Conversation with the Sciences

• Author / Creator

  Crumpton, Jennifer A

• Though the world at large is a complex system of interdisciplinarity, secondary classrooms continue to be divided by subject, a modernist orientation, drawing lines between disciplines in lieu of nurturing conversations between them. Ultimately, what results are students who are made to keep containers and categories of information in silos of brainspace, rarely concerned with the patterns and connections between the models of thinking they represent. To date, the research for metacognition and analogous thinking gives teachers reason to pursue interdisciplinary efforts and cross-curricular paradigms. However, in my view as a seasoned English Language Arts teacher at an Alberta secondary school, without harnessing such instruments of cognitive dissonance like metaphor and allegoresis within interdisciplinarity, teachers are not exploiting opportunities for students to find patterns and connections, to entertain actual conversation. What results is an interdisciplinarity that merely checks a box, cross-curricula that dissolves one field into the other, or steals pieces of one to feed lack in another. What results is a student who is made to keep containers and categories of information in silos of brainspace, rarely concerned with the patterns and connections between the models of thinking they represent.
  This thesis emerges from the view that educators might benefit from a model that honours all disciplines and synergizes something new from the interdependence founded in interconnectivity. Our current classrooms are not properly tapping into those models of thinking that transcend discipline and comprise humanity, though our students walk across those lines daily. My intent is to explore the power of alien disciplines (Biology, Chemistry, Physics) in my classroom, building up the foundation of metacognition and taxonomies of interdisciplinary interaction, then using that foundation to harnesses the power of true allegoresis by way of metaphor. What results is an interdisciplinarity that fosters cognitive dissonance and helps students pattern their learning and teachers pattern their teaching. In implementing this reframing in my own teaching context, my own immersion in the current system will serve as an opportunity to question that system, and allow students to anchor their learning somewhere deeper than the categories in which the disciplines are currently expected to live.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • cross-curricula
  • allegoresis
  • metacognition
  • interdisciplinarity
  • cognitive dissonance
  • analogous thinking
  • metaphor

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Education

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-gzrz-j875

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.