Abstract
Transdisciplinarity offers a different philosophy and approach both of how to effectively address issues/problems and how to improve and change difficult situations we have been experiencing in the modern world, in different and multiple levels of reality and under conditions of complexity and uncertainty. Addressing these problems becomes precisely effective because of the way transdisciplinarity achieves dynamic collaboration and integration among disciplines, epistemologies and methodologies. We could argue that, in essence, an ongoing “dialectic synergy” between disciplines, methodologies, scientists and researchers in various forms and at many interactive levels is created. The constant dialectic synergies generate the “Syn-epistemic Wholeness”. Syn-epistemic wholeness is a new “entity” that transcends the involved disciplines (or sciences) without replacing them; it rather enriches them by offering the potential of a synchronous, harmonic function in a flexible and constantly evolving methodological framework. By this logic, the Syn-epistemic Wholeness allows the emergence of a new general perception, the essence of a new “paradigm”, which has new philosophy, theory, epistemology as well as new research strategies and practices and which offers rich possibilities and alternatives to address complex, multi-parameter and multifarious problems. “Syn-epistemic Wholeness” would be an alternative term for Transdisciplinarity. This paper presents a Transdisciplinary Social Pedagogic Model, which emerged through extensive research projects and carried out within school communities in Greece. The research projects have the general orientation to address and prevent pupils’ antisocial behaviors. The Model motivates a lot of transdisciplinary dialectic synergies that incrementally and improvingly developed among: (a) the involved disciplines, epistemologies and methodologies and (b) among scientists, researchers and all other stakeholders, who were those who directly or indirectly were involved in the school and in the wider community.
Highlights
Modern societies have been facing a large number of an ever increasing complexity of problems that the scientific community is called for encountering effectively
In this paper we will make a synoptic presentation of a Transdisciplinary Social Pedagogic Model, which emerged through extensive research projects carried out within school communities in Greece
In order for the key research questions to be effectively answered it was necessary to develop and build a well-designed Trans- disciplinary Social Pedagogic Model. At this point we should answer briefly two legitimate questions: (a) Why is the Model considered Transdisciplinary? (b) Why is the Model considered Social Pedagogic? (Α) Why is the Model considered Transdisciplinary? There are certain key features that describe what constitutes the transdisciplinary character of a research, which we present in a generalized form, since we selected them from various studies (Gibbs, 2015; Leavy, 2011; Nicolescu, 1997; Wickson et al, 2006) and from our own related research efforts (Kekes & Mylonakou, 2006; Mylonakou-Keke, 2013, 2014, 2015)
Summary
Modern societies have been facing a large number of an ever increasing complexity of problems that the scientific community is called for encountering effectively. Transdisciplinarity offers a different philosophy and approach both of how to effectively address issues/ problems and how to improve and change difficult situations we have been experiencing in the modern world, in different and multiple levels of reality and under conditions of complexity and uncertainty Addressing these problems becomes precisely effective because of the way transdisciplinary achieves collaboration and integration among disciplines. In essence, transdisciplinarity generates and feeds an ongoing “dialectic synergy” between scientists and sciences in various forms and at many levels within a flexible and constantly evolving methodological framework; (see below 3) This dialectic synergy activates and motivates disciplines to co-create a “syn-epistemic wholeness”, (see Figure 3) that is, a new “entity” that has a new philosophy, theory, epistemology, and new research strategies and practices offering enhanced potentials and alternatives to tackle complex and multi-parameter problems. The Model was based on many and high levels of collaboration, essentially within the multiple transdisciplinary synergies that incrementally and improvingly developed between: (a) the involved disciplines epistemologies and methodologies; and (b) all stakeholders (i.e. scientists, researchers, community partners, etc)
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