A transdisciplinary approach to literacy research, practice, and policy

A transdisciplinary approach to literacy research, practice, and policy Patriann Smith, Associate Professor at the University of South Florida’s Department of Teaching and Learning, discusses transdisciplinarity and how it could inform approaches to literacy research, practice, and policy. Transdisciplinarity, defined as ‘that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines’ (Nicolescu, 2010, p. 22), was first identified in the research of Jean Piaget (1986-1980), a Swiss philosopher and psychologist. Emerging then as that which existed ‘between’ and ‘across’ disciplines, and later by Austrian thinker Erich Jantsch as that which existed ‘within’ disciplines, transdisciplinarity eventually came to connote freedom of thought as espoused by Edgar Morin.