TY - CONF

T1 - Making flexibility durable

T2 - Interdisciplinarity and Bloom’s taxonomy of cognition

AU - Ryberg, Marie L.

PY - 2015/5/27

Y1 - 2015/5/27

N2 - Within the last 15 years, interdisciplinarity has (re-)emerged as a promising way of organising knowledge and education in what is often described as a still more complex world. A key assumption is that disciplines in themselves are not enough to create new knowledge or prepare young people for the future. Instead, interdisciplinarity is highlighted for its capacities to create new forms of knowledge, for its potentials for innovation, and for offering a flexible way of organising knowledge that can account for what we often describe as an increasingly complex world. In Denmark, the current interdisciplinary engagement has not been restricted to research policies and higher education, but has been taken up in the Danish upper-secondary school as a central organising principle in an extensive and contested reform in 2005. Interestingly, the preoccupation with interdisciplinarity in a Danish context has been accompanied by an increased deployment of taxonomies of learning as a way of managing and assessing interdisciplinary education. This paper is concerned with the translations of Bloom’s taxonomy of cognition into a key device in managing interdisciplinarity in Danish education. As such, the paper turns from a concern with how ‘technology makes society durable’ (Latour 1991), to asking instead how flexibility is made durable through specific devices. The paper examines the translations of Bloom’s taxonomy of cognition from its appearance in a 1956 publication in ‘Taxonomy of Educational Objectives’ to contemporary interdisciplinary education in the Danish grammar school. It asks what kind of work has been done to the taxonomy and what work it does for interdisciplinary education. And it concludes that Bloom’s taxonomy is a device that is concerned with making the implicit explicit, yet in doing so, it enacts a particular aesthetics of knowledge that obscures others.

AB - Within the last 15 years, interdisciplinarity has (re-)emerged as a promising way of organising knowledge and education in what is often described as a still more complex world. A key assumption is that disciplines in themselves are not enough to create new knowledge or prepare young people for the future. Instead, interdisciplinarity is highlighted for its capacities to create new forms of knowledge, for its potentials for innovation, and for offering a flexible way of organising knowledge that can account for what we often describe as an increasingly complex world. In Denmark, the current interdisciplinary engagement has not been restricted to research policies and higher education, but has been taken up in the Danish upper-secondary school as a central organising principle in an extensive and contested reform in 2005. Interestingly, the preoccupation with interdisciplinarity in a Danish context has been accompanied by an increased deployment of taxonomies of learning as a way of managing and assessing interdisciplinary education. This paper is concerned with the translations of Bloom’s taxonomy of cognition into a key device in managing interdisciplinarity in Danish education. As such, the paper turns from a concern with how ‘technology makes society durable’ (Latour 1991), to asking instead how flexibility is made durable through specific devices. The paper examines the translations of Bloom’s taxonomy of cognition from its appearance in a 1956 publication in ‘Taxonomy of Educational Objectives’ to contemporary interdisciplinary education in the Danish grammar school. It asks what kind of work has been done to the taxonomy and what work it does for interdisciplinary education. And it concludes that Bloom’s taxonomy is a device that is concerned with making the implicit explicit, yet in doing so, it enacts a particular aesthetics of knowledge that obscures others.

UR - https://www.dasts.dk/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/NordicSTSConferenceFullProgramme.pdf

M3 - Paper

ER -