The Interdisciplinary Approach in Education as a Phenomenon of “Meaning Regaining”: The Problem of Dialogue

Abstract

One of the most significant problems in education is the loss of knowledge in­tegrity, overcoming educational inflation. Another important problem of human education is the loss of meaning, which reveals itself in a loss of one’s identity, an alienation from the real world and a decrease in motivation for cognition, par­ticularly towards oneself. The meanings and objectives of modern education lie in the information transmission (it is not knowledge gained from within), which is regarded as a pedagogically adapted social experience from the teacher to the student. Such retranslational nature of education is monological, it isolates the student from oneself and from the real world, and it does not provide the op­portunity to reveal and fulfil his cultural and historical, anthropological “code” in the process of cognition. The sameness of students’ answers “at the output” in accordance with the received volume of identical information “at the input” is a sign of the student’s loss due to his inability to produce his own meanings, turning him into a mass or unified student. From philosophical and methodologi­cal point of view, the dialogic education paves the way to student’s “meanings regaining”. The student is viewed not as a “blank sheet”, but as a “seed of an un­known plant” with his own mission, cultural and historical, anthropological per­sonality traits. The student’s discovery of the inner space of meanings, “mea­nings regaining” both in education and society, becomes possible not by absorbing “correct” information, rather by creating one’s own educational pro­duct on the basis of exploring the real-world objects of interdisciplinary and me­tasubject nature. The design of interdisciplinary educational content implies the educational dialogue projection at all its levels (target, content, technologi­cal, evaluative). Interdisciplinarity lies in engaging students into a dialogue that enables them to discover themselves and the surrounding environment. The crea­tion of dialogic space on the basis of interdisciplinary integration is carried out more intensively provided that the teaching-learning process changes from monologue to dialogue. The meanings presupposed by the interdisciplinary con­tent of education finds its “interlocutor” – that is the student’s meaning. Commu­nication arises when the student discovers the outside world by embodying the principle of resemblance between the microcosm and the macrocosm, which provides education with heuristic context. The article also considers the ideas of interdisciplinarity and heuristics through the perspective of Russian philoso­phy at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, which laid philosophical, methodolo­gical and didactic grounds for the design of national educational system.