Transdisciplinary Emergence and Constructive Consilience

Abstract

Humankind hungers to share its various culturally-generated perspectives, or “worldviews”, most obviously expressed in alternative languages (Nisbett, 2005). Depending upon our views, we each construct a basic foundation of thought that our upbringing, environment, and educational system then hone into a disciplinary framework. Twenty-first century educators will succeed best when they at once encourage the emergence among learners of a shared, “consilient” (leaping up and together), creative set of thought pattern styles (Wilson, 1999) and promote the construction of abstract bridges through language that cross cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Coastline Community College online learners of French language and culture have achieved a new transdisciplinary consilience by learning effectively how to deploy eight particular patterns of creative thought that at once typify the traditional francophone schooling goals of argumentation and analysis and define the mental cross-fertilization that underlies a unity of knowledge.