Article 2. The Heart of Transdisciplinarianism (and you thought Anthroposopy was hard to pronounce!)

Many students benefit by being "held" within the work of the parents, the Class Teacher and the Remedial or Transdisciplinary Therapeutic Educator (TTE)™. The students, who are held in such a way, often do not run the risk of feeling like they are "broken" and thus, require so many different professionals to "fix them". These students feel a "web of like-thinking, a vessel of spiritual consciousness" weaving between the adults in their life. They feel a security in this connectedness between those who care for them.

Central to this paradigm of working is the TTE or the Remedial Teacher. This person serves in the position of "The One Who Carries"… called, in the Gradalis Training, "The Christopher Teacher". This person keeps all the adults focused together and aware of each other and what the student is experiencing.

It becomes increasingly essential to develop a common "way of seeing" and a diagnostic language for what is observed. Thus the TTE or Remedial Teacher needs to be well versed in the various ways of approaching learning challenges and of understanding their underlying causes. This specialist teacher needs to have a fair amount of life experience in teaching and in therapeutic understandings of various challenges to learning. To work in a transdisciplinarian way, one needs to have an almost insatiable thirst for study in the many fields of therapeutic work, which contributes to understanding the challenged learner. To work with doctors, therapists and remedial professionals from these many paradigms of understanding, one must share the commonalities and the language.

We are in the turn of the century time, so often referred to by Rudolf Steiner and others. During this time, the whole of the human being is going through a change in consciousness. Whenever one enters a new way of thinking, a feeling of being disoriented occurs before one finds his/her ground. Transdisciplinary Thinking is "ground finding" work in this time of change. Human cognition, (thinking activity), is more challenged than ever, more maligned as an inhumane and cold process, and thus, finds itself re-defining its own process.

The term, "transdisciplinary" is arising partly because the loneliness and ineffectiveness of specialization within a single field of knowledge has, so-to-speak, run it's course. I first encountered the term in the office of the Speech and Language Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. A speech and language specialist, who was, at the time, working in my private practice office, told me of a process used in her department at the university. They call this process "Transdisciplinary Play-Based Assessment". I observed such a team working at the university and became convinced not only of its effectiveness, but of the human warmth and hope that is generated by such working between professionals.

At the core of this transdisciplinary approach is a willingness for professionals to join into a team whose members share roles and systematically cross discipline boundaries. As a result, a more efficient and comprehensive assessment and intervention plan can be developed and provided. The communication between team members reflects a give-and-take, shared mutual respect and transparency in sharing from each discipline for the purpose of advancing the health of the "focus person" (student, client, patient). Thus professionals from the various disciplines teach, learn and work together in order to best provide intervention for the focus person and his or her family. In this approach also, parents are considered to be central and they are therefore, included in the regularly planned communications. The role differentiation between disciplines is defined by the needs of the situation. The later is in direct contrast to current discipline-specific interventions. As a result, there is usually one main "carrier" who serves as a hub to the other professionals. This teamwork usually results in a much smaller number of professionals interacting with the focus person on a daily basis.

One can learn more of this through many sources such as a book entitled Transdisciplinary Play-Based Intervention: Guidelines for Developing a Meaningful Curriculum for Young Children by Toni W. Linder. While Ms. Linder is not a Waldorf Educator, she offers insights very valuable and needed in Waldorf Education. Many universities and professional organizations are involved in a philosophical struggle to birth this new paradigm of teamworking across many disciplines… In my internet search, using only the term, "transdisciplinary", I found hundreds of links to universities, departments and research organizations looking into this kind of working. Of particular interest to me was an article entitled "The Transdisciplinary Evolution of the University…Condition for Sustainable Development". This article is a reprint of a speech by Basarab Nicolescu given in 1997 at the International Association of Universities Conference in Bangkok, Thailand.Don't be deterred by the French Language when you first open this site, proceed to the Anglais (English flag) and browse the articles. The article I herein refer to is entitled as above.

In this speech, the author speaks of the necessity of a phase of learning for all professionals, in which, the trainee necessarily passes through a "phase of specialization" while "learning to do". Later, the author states, "If one truly wants to reconcile the exigency of competition and the concern for the equal opportunity for all human beings, in the future, every profession should be an authentically woven occupation, an occupation which would bind together, in the interior of human beings, threads linking them to other occupations… In transdisciplinary thinking therefore "Learning to Do" (acquiring a profession) is none other than "an apprenticeship in creativity".

The above named speech, while purely philosophical in nature, has deep alignment with the aims of Waldorf Education and especially those of Anthroposophical Therapeutic Approaches to Healing. This organization and other like-minded endeavors are "on the path" to awakening actions in alignment with "equality, fraternite and egalite"...the heart of the threefold organizational structuring principle. Just to know that other souls are in the pursuit of social healing by melding the professions through the commonly shared intention: HEALING… gives one hope and a sense of wider connectedness.

When I first entitled the Gradalis Training Courses,Transdisciplinary Therapeutic Education™, I did not know of my colleagues in the wider world (other than those at CU Boulder). I am now filled with gratitude for this emerging field and invite my readers to comment, send more links, etc. in the open forum pages.

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