Disciplinary Connections Research Articles

Expanding Perspectives: Materializing Musical Instruments

ABSTRACT This article suggests the potential of organology is under-developed. It proposes an expanded vision for the discipline’s relevance from the perspective of the non-organological world, which in turn, undervalues organology’s potential for informing non-musical disciplines. It argues for re-positioning musical instruments—highly specialised manufactured objects with complex and particular properties, functions, and contexts—alongside, and in relation to other equally complex material objects, their functions, practices, networks, histories, geographies, and ideologies. This re-evaluation aims to encourage organologists to consider the “wider materiality” of the objects they study and to seek out new disciplinary connections beyond their traditional spheres of reference.

Power in the Home: Digital Housekeeping and Its Relevance to Information Behaviour, PIM, and Information Ethics

ABSTRACTDigital housekeeping (DH) is an emerging research topic focused on the labour and social implications of setting up and maintaining technology in the home. Although examined by multiple fields, the literature on DH has yet to be reviewed and its potential overlap and synergy with library and information science (LIS) have yet to be explored. We therefore conducted a tool‐supported review of 26 scholarly publications on DH. Below we summarise the people‐ and relationship‐focused sub‐topics and findings of DH literature and explore promising directions for future research in LIS, particularly in information behaviour and personal information management. The poster visually maps the sub‐topics and disciplinary connections.

Research advances and trends in anatomy from 2013 to 2023: A visual analysis based on CiteSpace and VOSviewer.

As the cornerstone of medicine, the development of anatomy is related to many disciplines and fields and has received extensive attention from researchers. How to integrate and grasp the cutting-edge information in this field quickly is a challenge for researchers, so the aim of this study is to analyze research in anatomy using CiteSpace and VOSviewer in order to identify research hotspots and future directions. To offer a fresh viewpoint for assessing the academic influences of researchers, nations, or institutions on anatomy, and to examine the development of hotspots in anatomical study and to forecast future trends. A total of 4637 anatomy-related publications from 2013 to 2023 were collected from Web of Science Core Collection databases. Their temporal distribution, spatial distribution, cited authors, co-cited journals, keywords, and disciplinary connections in the literature were analyzed using CiteSpace and VOSviewer, and a knowledge graph was constructed. The temporal distribution shows a general fluctuation in the amount of literature published from 2013 to 2023. In spatial distribution, the total number of published articles was highest in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, the United States leading. Tubbs, Rhoton, Iwanaga, and LaPrade are important authors in anatomy. Clinical Anatomy, Surgical and Radiologic Anatomy, and Journal of Anatomy were the most highly cited journals. Analysis of keywords and citation emergence showed that the research hotspots and trends in anatomy focused mainly on anatomy education, digital technology, and surgical management. At the same time, anatomy showed a trend toward multidisciplinary crossover, developing closer relationships with molecular biology, immunology, and clinical medicine. Current research in anatomy focuses on innovative reform of the educational model and the application and promotion of digital technology. Also, multidisciplinary cross-fertilization is an inevitable trend for the future development of anatomy.

Multimodal Literacies in Elementary Teacher Education: Facilitating Culturally Relevant Pedagogy with Mathematics

This study presents qualitative action research conducted in elementary teacher education coursework. Teacher candidates were introduced to multimodal literacies in mathematics by representing and communicating content through multiple modes such as signs, symbols, images, text, gestures, manipulatives, music, videos, and more. Teacher candidates used multimodal literacies to implement and understand culturally relevant pedagogy in their assignments as students, in lesson plans, and in-field experience exercises during a semester course. Three focal participants are outlined to highlight similarities and differences across cases through the ways teacher candidates navigated coursework with multimodal literacies and mathematics while enacting culturally relevant pedagogy. Multiple assignments from each participant were collected and analyzed, culminating with a post-term semi-structured interview. Findings illuminate intricate interactions within teacher candidates’ multiple identities through their cultural awareness with others and in disciplinary connections. Their learning and teaching development illustrates a dynamic interplay of literacy, multimodality, and mathematics with the implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy, ultimately suggesting the need for teacher educators to consider how these connections can be best facilitated.

Exploring multidisciplinary teamwork of applied physics and engineering students in a challenge-based learning course

ABSTRACT Background In responding to the global problems facing humankind, there is great value in equipping science and engineering students with skills to function well in multidisciplinary teams. Little attention has been paid into the factors that influence multidisciplinary collaboration and teamwork of science and engineering students. Purpose This research describes multidisciplinary teamwork of applied physics and mechanical engineering students in a challenge-based learning (CBL) course. The study aimed to: a) identify the facilitators and barriers to multidisciplinary teamwork and b) explore learning outcomes connected to working in multidisciplinary teams. Sample 30 students registered to the course, two teachers, and three tutors participated in this research. Design and Methods An instrumental case study was conducted in the context of a pilot CBL course. Data included interviews, reflection reports, observations, and design posters. Transcribed video recordings were searched in an attempt to demonstrate the codes revealed with the qualitative content analysis of interview transcripts and reflection reports. Results The results indicated knowledge acquisition, application, and an awareness of other disciplinary approaches as the learning outcomes with some differences for engineering and physics students. The findings also yielded individual (e.g. knowledge of control theory), team (e.g. disciplinary perspectives), and course factors (e.g. disciplinary connections to the challenge) that influenced multidisciplinary teamwork. Conclusion Multidisciplinary teamwork is supported by the unique ways of thinking and approaching problems of the two disciplines. Implications contribute to future research and thinking for similar learning environments while improving student learning in multidisciplinary teams.

A necessary evil? Examining the complexities of care and commodification

In this article, I draw on a case study of interviews with Ontario grass-fed beef farmers about cow welfare and theorize these using the analytics of animal geographies and biopolitics. I engage with the former's work on animal agency and subjectivity, and the latter's focus on animal commodification, showing how welfare practices impact cows’ subjectivities, agencies, bodies, and interrelations. I make clear that cows exercise agency in their relationships with farmers, despite and in response to the different forms of governance that shape cows’ welfare and relationships with farmers. Analyzing welfare practices as different forms of biopower, I show how cows’ liveliness impacts their commodity value and describe the contexts in which farmers build emotional and disciplinary connections to cows. Central to my argument is that cows’ subjective and agentic features complement and complicate their commodification. Fusing animal geographies and biopolitics, I extend my analysis of cow welfare into a discussion of the emotional, economic, and ethically complex relationships between farmers and cows. Lastly, I contribute to emerging debates in literature on the complexities of caring and killing in human-animal relations through my analyses of welfare as an avenue for exploring the function of care, commodification, and killing in farmer-cow relations. Attending to these complexities, I argue, disrupts fixed logic about the ethics of animal production, while prompting us to rethink the way we relate with animals we call food.

Aprendizaje basado en proyectos (ABP) para desarrollar habilidades académicas en la educación superior: una experiencia en Sumapaz

La Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UN) ofrece los Programas Especiales de Admisión y Movilidad Académica (PEAMA), para abrir el acceso a la universidad a bachilleres que normalmente no lo tendrían por falta de recursos y bajos puntajes de admisión. En el 2016 se crea el PEAMA Sumapaz, programa que utiliza la metodología de Aprendizaje Basado en Proyectos (ABP). El ABP específico de este programa se propone como objetivo primordial que los estudiantes consoliden habilidades académicas pobremente desarrolladas en la educación básica y media, a la par que avancen en las carreras elegidas con comprensión verdadera de los contenidos de la mayor cantidad de asignaturas que puedan relacionarse con los proyectos auténticos que realizan en Sumapaz. Durante el segundo semestre de 2018 realizamos el proyecto “Conocer a Sumapaz desde una perspectiva ecológica”. Presentamos aquí los resultados preliminares de un estudio cualitativo-narrativo que describe la forma como construimos el proyecto y logramos sus propósitos con profesores y estudiantes participantes en el programa, concentrándonos en el manejo que hicimos del desarrollo de habilidades académicas en los estudiantes. Utilizamos datos provenientes de las reuniones de planeación entre los docentes, así como cortas entrevistas periódicas a los estudiantes sobre cómo fueron entendiendo el proyecto y lo que aprendieron en él. Hacemos así un aporte pedagógico que ilustra cómo el uso en los primeros semestres universitarios de estrategias de enseñanza/aprendizaje centradas en la actividad de los estudiantes, y estimuladoras de conexiones disciplinares y desarrollo de habilidades académicas, puede facilitar la permanencia en la educación superior.

Infusing Humanities in STEM Education: Student Opinions of Disciplinary Connections in an Introductory Chemistry Course

The Next Generation Science Standards and other educational reforms support the formation of deep connections across the STEM disciplines. Integrated STEM is considered as a best practice by the educational communities of the disparate disciplines. However, the integration of non-STEM disciplines is understudied and generally limited to the integration of art (STEAM). Humanistic STEM blends the study of STEM with interest in and concern for human affairs, welfare, values, or culture. This study looks at an infusion of the humanities into an online chemistry course to see if there is an influence on student connection between course content and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Specifically, students were asked about the course making clear connection to STEM disciplines, between science and non-science, between science and the real world, and a widened perspective of science connection other courses in their degree programs. Items on a Likert scale were presented as part of the end of course evaluations and yielded 59 responses. Although no statistically significant difference in the pre- and post-infusion agreement, it is evident that the additional perspectives did no harm. The positive movement in this pilot study encourages further investigation with stronger infusions of both STEM and humanities content.

Jurisprudence in the Era of Change: Subject and Structure of the Discipline

The law exists in the form of institutions and in the form of representations of institutions, since the representation of something (phenomenon) has a conceptual dimension in the representation of something (concept). Representations of law and representations of law are two aspects of the expression and manifestation of the general legal reality. This, in fact, leads to a fundamental dilemma in determining the subject of legal science. This is the science of law or the science of legal science. Given that the concept of law is a theory of law developed into a system of definitions, the practical language of law finds itself in the theoretical language of jurisprudence, and vice versa. The languages in which the law operates, and the languages in which the phenomenon of law is interpreted, constitute the general object and subject of jurisprudence.Jurisprudence is a conceptual part of legal reality, both an object and a subject of legal science. The evolution of jurisprudence in the cultural-historical logic of changes in its subject and methods is the basis for changes in its disciplinary structure and connections in the general system of social and political sciences. Each cultural and historical epoch of the existence of law corresponds to its own grammar of law and its own epistemology of law, that is, its own analytical language and disciplinary format of legal knowledge. The law exists in the definitions of its concept. The concept of law has both an ontological and epistemological status. One thinks of law because it exists, and one understands the law because it is defined. Each tradition of understanding the law can be conceptually seen in the phenomenon of law that other traditions of legal understanding do not see or do not notice. The history of the development of the concept of law (conceptualization of law) contains the history of the development of legal institutions (institutionalization of law). Both components of legal reality — objective and subjective grounds and conditions for the emergence and development of the phenomenon of law live in the framework definitions of their social culture, its language and discourse. That is, they live in historical forms of awareness and understanding of one’s own law — from the law indicated in rituals, myths, signs and symbols, to the law indicated in canonical texts, doctrines and concepts; from the law of disciplinary society to the law of network communities; from the law of political domination and bureaucratic management to the law of civil communications and network agreements.

Enacting the Australian Curriculum: Primary and secondary teachers’ approaches to integrating the curriculum

Integrated approaches to curriculum planning and delivery are not a recent phenomenon. In the 1930s John Dewey advocated for a more cohesive conceptualisation of students’ learning. Yet, despite state and national endorsement of curriculum integration in Australia, it is generally considered an alternative curriculum design that has failed to gain traction in Australian schools. A qualitative case study, situated in two inner city government schools in the state of Victoria, explored the integrative approaches undertaken by primary and secondary teachers when planning and implementing their curriculum to account for their students’ needs, interests and the school and community context. The study identified that the establishment of a concept-based curriculum framework which documented the learning goals, assessment tasks and planned learning experiences sustained the teachers’ focus on the cross disciplinary connections. A conceptual framework emerged as critical for generating the professional dialogue pivotal to planning and enacting integrated curriculum.

“This is Not Normal”: Talking Trump in Undergraduate Diversity Courses

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how faculty members teaching undergraduate diversity courses at liberal arts colleges in the southern United States addressed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in their classrooms. Background: Humanities and social science faculty teaching undergraduate diversity courses faced the decision of whether, and how, to address the 2016 U.S. presidential election in their courses. Diversity courses represent a compelling context for examining this event, as instructors must routinely tackle charged and controversial topics and such courses have become the subject of debates around purpose, course content, and instructional methods. Methodology: This study draws upon one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with 38 faculty members teaching required undergraduate diversity courses at three predominantly White liberal arts colleges in the southern United States. Contribution: Understanding faculty members’ approaches to handling a critical political event sheds light on how faculty in multiple contexts might prepare for difficult dialogues in their classrooms. This study can serve to prompt reflection about how campuses engage with contemporary controversies in an era of reduced public trust in higher education and skepticism that free speech is a fundamental value of higher education. This study also offers a contribution to understanding how faculty members’ and students’ social identities including race and gender influence the dynamics of classroom discussions about contemporary controversies. Findings: Drawing upon the curricular processes detailed in the multicontextual model for diverse learning environments, findings from this study address faculty members’ personal post-election reactions, concern for minoritized students, decisions whether to disclose their political leanings, and their attempts to promote multiple perspectives, civility, and disciplinary connections to the political climate. Recommendations for Practitioners: Faculty members, educational developers, and administrators can use this study to consider how to address challenging and controversial events in the classroom and how to protect academic freedom to teach about and learn from these events. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers can advance understandings of how contemporary controversies and discussions of the political climate play out in college classrooms by investigating faculty and student experiences in multiple disciplinary, institutional, and regional contexts. Impact on Society: Higher education institutions in the United States face increasing public scrutiny and calls for greater accountability. Professors, in particular, are often caricatured as partisan ideologues intent upon indoctrinating students to particular political positions. A better understanding of how faculty members consider and approach discussions of a critical event may help shed light on the reality of many college classrooms and the self-reflective approaches to handling controversy faculty members may espouse.

Development of Technical Communication in China: Program Building and Field Convergence

ABSTRACTThis article examines the emergence of technical communication as an academic field in China from the perspectives of pedagogy, program building, market needs, professionalization, and local sociopolitical contexts. Highlighting the close disciplinary connections between translation and technical communication, it identifies visionary faculty with overseas experiences as national leaders in curriculum innovation. It also explores the close industry–academia connections facilitated by semi-open WeChat groups and existing approaches to building international partnerships with technical communicators in China.

Interdisciplinary approaches for deep learning

The Norwegian national curricula for primary and secondary education are currently undergoing reforms, which will be implemented from 2020. The underlying documents regarding the reform are studied in this article, and conclude that learners should be provided with beneficial conditions to develop values and knowledge to manage their lives well. An essential notion is ‘deep learning’ whose implication seems to be acquisition of more in-depth knowledge and understanding of subject areas. The present article argues that learning is about making connections, whether it be noticing connections between isolated subject areas, or, perhaps, between theoretical concepts and practical tasks. Further, the article argues that interdisciplinary approaches extend knowledge as they typically work across subject areas and support learners in discovering disciplinary connections. Claims are made that interdisciplinary strategies have the capacities to facilitate various learning styles, motivation and variation. Such facilitations are required in education that is democratic and which targets all learners. Hence, the article argues that interdisciplinarity and deep learning are concepts that work together, and in which critical thinking and creativity are core elements. The argumentation is based on the four official documents NOU 2014:7, NOU 2015:8, Report to the Storting 28, The Standing Committee on Education, Research and Church Affairs’ recommendation to the Storting 19 S, as well as, data findings discussed in a master study which discusses teachers’ perceptions of interdisciplinarity and learning.

What Are Book Clubs Doing in Health Class? Enhancing Learning and Making Empathetic Disciplinary Connections through YA Novels

What Are Book Clubs Doing in Health Class? Enhancing Learning and Making Empathetic Disciplinary Connections through YA Novels

Review: Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century , by Mary Simonson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. x, 278 pp. This book would make a great movie. With an impressive cast, celebrity cameos, tightly woven plot-lines, and scene-setting vignettes, Mary Simonson’s study is devoted to motion pictures—literally, to images that move. Her book embraces theatrical genres (opera, ballet, revue, musical comedy) and their musical, visual, and gestural aspects; the practical realities of stage performance and pageantry; dramatic impersonation and its opposite (acrobatic stunts, vaudeville skits, so-called “modern” dance); the influence of recording technologies; and the history and aesthetics of photography and cinema itself. A scholar of film and media studies, Simonson is primarily interested in the process of adaptation—ways in which performers, dramatic characters, narrative themes, musical extracts, song and dance numbers, and even paintings “turned up” in strange, new, and specifically American contexts in the years around 1900. In particular, Simonson describes slippage between genres incorporating dance; and she focuses on women—dancers, singers, and actresses turned political commentators, cultural arbiters of taste, model citizens, and masterminds of their own musical shows. To Simonson, these shows and the women behind them (not to forget those in the audience) open a new optic onto a “vibrant American artistic culture,” one both dependent on and resistant to European traditions (p. 199). Moreover, as Simonson states, female performance betrays a network of interconnections and exchange, not only between the arts and their related practitioners but between broader strands of cultural influence. The prologue offers a first example of what Simonson calls “intermediality”—artistic experimentation across genre boundaries, involving the dissemination of techniques, stylistic vocabularies, and aesthetics seemingly specific to different visual, musical, and performing arts (on which more later). Here we learn how numbers from the black musical comedy My Friend from Kentucky circulated in the early 1900s—evidence, to Simonson, not only of the legacy of minstrel theater but of “contemporary practices of artistic …

How to manage a revolution: Isaac Newton in the early twentieth century

In the first half of the twentieth century, dramatic developments in physics came to be viewed as revolutionary, apparently requiring a complete overthrow of previous theories. British physicists were keen to promote quantum physics and relativity theory as exciting and new, but the rhetoric of revolution threatened science's claim to stability and its prestigious connections with Isaac Newton. This was particularly problematic in the first decades of the twentieth century, within the broader context of political turmoil, world war, and the emergence of modernist art and literature. This article examines how physicists responded to their cultural and political environment and worked to maintain disciplinary connections with Isaac Newton, emphasizing the importance of both the old and the new. In doing so they attempted to make the physics ‘revolution’ more palatable to a British public seeking a sense of permanence in a rapidly changing world.

Spacing access to justice: geographical perspectives on disabled people's interactions with the criminal justice system as victims of crime

Over the past two decades, research emerging from the sub-discipline of ‘geographies of disability’ has highlighted the significant socio-spatial barriers that shape disabled people's everyday lives. Disabled people's battles to obtain equitable access through the justice system when they are victims of crime is one such arena in which these barriers become readily apparent, and yet to date, geographers' engagement with the spaces of the criminal justice system has been noticeably absent. This paper seeks to redress this lacuna by discussing the findings of qualitative research undertaken in Ireland on disabled people's experiences of the criminal justice system as victims of crime. It highlights not just how the justice system presents practical barriers to disabled people such as inaccessible courthouses or Garda stations, but also the fundamental ways in which legislation constitutes certain groups of disabled people as vulnerable or incapable, and therefore ‘out-of-place’ in the justice system. The paper makes a case for building disciplinary connections between geographies of disability, geographies of crime and ‘critical legal geographies’ in rendering these barriers visible.

Practicing physical geography: An actor-network view of physical geography exemplified by the rock art stability index

This paper explores the use of a new pedagogy, the rock art stability index (RASI), to engender deeper understanding of weathering science concepts by students. Owing to its dynamic nature, RASI represents a quintessential actor network for weathering science, because it links task in the landscape with an active material practice and an alternative materialistic world-view recently called for in positivistic science, to create place. Using concept maps as an assessment tool, 571 college undergraduate students and 13 junior high school integrated science students (ages 12—13) were evaluated for increased learning potential between pre- and post-field experiences. Further, this article demonstrates that when students use RASI to learn the fundamental complex science of weathering they make in-depth connections between weathering form and process not achieved through traditional, positivistic weathering pedagogy. We argue that RASI draws upon inherent actor networks which allow students to link weathering form and process to an animate conceptualization of landscape. Conceptualizing landscape as sentient actor networks removes weathering science disciplinary connections and their inherent pedagogic practices. Our focus in this paper is not to challenge weathering ontology and epistemology, but rather to argue that there is a need for a pedagogical paradigm shift in weathering science.

“We’re Like the Gardeners in the Book”: Using a Schoolwide Read to Grow a Literacy Community

This article describes a schoolwide read that was conducted in a middle school in the Southeastern United States. We answer the question: What happens when a middle school implements a schoolwide read of a young adult novel that explores multicultural issues? Our data suggest that schools who participate in schoolwide literacy events like this one and who intentionally choose texts that address the needs of their students provide opportunities for social learning within and beyond classrooms, forge cross disciplinary connections, and foster talk that leads to critical dialogue.

‘Understood Relations’: Law and Literature in Early Modern Studies1

AbstractThis overview situates early modern criticism engaged with the interface between law and literature in relation to the larger intellectual dialogue that has, since the 1980s, become definable as the ‘Law and Literature movement’. It outlines the history of the field in academia, defines the key issues at stake, and finally goes on to address the specific disciplinary connections and indeed disconnections that underlie the interest that has been focused on this interrelation in the culture of Renaissance England. Through a survey of symptomatic recent publications that take on the challenges of the subject, it seeks to identify trends, acknowledge crises and intimate possibilities of further exploration. The implications of such work are significant for both legal and literary hermeneutics, and suggestive not only of the history of interdisciplinarity, but also of what academic disciplines mean and how they function in our times.