Sense-making across disciplines : physical models, theoretical frameworks, and the connections between education in the humanities and sciences

Abstract

Across disciplines, the fundamental goal of authentic learning is sense-making: making sense of the world around us, our interactions, and art. As education shifts from a discipline focused on propagating knowledge as ‘stuff’ to a focus on propagating understanding and teaching the means towards understanding, the learning of sensemaking practice across the disciplines is becoming more important. In the recent past, education at nearly all levels has focused on the teaching of facts. The practices of experts within disciplines were taught rarely, if at all, and almost exclusively at the level of domain-specific skills. However, sense-making practices are surprisingly universal, and not just across the sciences. In this paper, I discuss the parallels between the sciences and humanities with respect to the practice of sense-making, specifically the mental/ physical models in the sciences and the theoretical frameworks deployed in the social sciences and the humanities. I will make the case that we should begin addressing in our classrooms the cross-cutting nature of the practices of all learners, so that students can see how what they are doing when analysing history is not epistemologically dissimilar to their physics class.