Author Archives: Sue L. T. McGregor

7/31 – Transdisciplinary Logics of Complexity

July 2020 / Feature Articles

Sue L. T. McGregor

Introduction

Sue L. T. McGregor

Transdisciplinarity (TD) has evolved over the last 40 years as a way to grapple with the complex, wicked problems facing humanity (McGregor, 2015; Nicolescu, 2014). Examples include health inequality, climate change, unsustainability, loss of diversity, poverty, uneven development, and unequal income and wealth distribution. Trans takes us beyond multi (more than one) and inter (between, among) disciplinarity, which are confined to university academic disciplines. Trans means …

12/21 – Planetary praxis and pedagogy: Transdisciplinary approaches to environmental sustainability

December 2019 / Book Reviews

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Sue L. T. McGregor

This book is edited by Canadians Shannon Moore and Richard Mitchell, both from Brock University in Ontario, Canada. Their edited collection is 150 pages in length with 7 chapters as well as an Introduction and Overview of the Volume. Nearly half (43%, 62 pages) of the book is devoted to two chapters (Chapter 2 Planetary praxis and pedagogy and Chapter 3, Marketing sustainable living). The remaining five chapters average 14 …

06/29 – Transdisciplinary Curriculum: Educational Philosophy and Rationale

June 2019 / Feature Articles

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Sue L. T. McGregor

Higher education is one of the most important arenas in which the transdisciplinary (TD) approach should be applied (Güvenen, 2016). Fortunately, educational institutions are “evolving [so they can] answer the demand for transdisciplinary skills” (Güvenen, 2016, p. 75). In concert, “educators are recognizing the vital significance of designing a transdisciplinary curriculum” (Smyth, 2017, p. 64). Indeed, it is a growing phenomenon in higher education as evidenced by several recent initiatives (see Albright, …

8/31 – Sue McGregor

Letters to Russ / August-November 2017

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My heart is sore as I write this letter to Russ. We never met in person (with my only mental image of him for years being his e-tag cartoon). Instead, we emailed and Skyped over a period of 11 years. He first reached out to me in October 2006. He wanted to review a copy of my home economics philosophy and leadership book released that year, titled Transformative Practice. It contained a chapter on transdisciplinarity …

4/22 – Challenges of Transdisciplinary Collaboration: A Conceptual Literature Review

Feature Articles / April-June 2017

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Sue L.T. McGregor

The focus of this paper was transdisciplinary collaboration and what is being said in the literature about the challenges of this aspect of transdisciplinarity work. A conceptual literature review revealed four conceptual threads: (a) managing group processes, (b) reflexivity, (c) common learning process, and (d) facilitating integration and synthesis. These challenges mirror the special qualities of transdisciplinary collaboration. Individual and collective diversities deeply affect communications and collaborations during transdisciplinary work. Those engaged in …

6/16 – Paul Gibbs. Transdisciplinary professional learning and practice.

Book Reviews / April - June 2015

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Gibbs, P. (Ed.). (2015). Transdisciplinary professional learning and practice. New York, NY: Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-11589-4; eBook ISBN 978-3-319-11590-0

Sue L. T. McGregor

Transcisciplinary professional learning and practice This review profiles a recent edited collection about transdisciplinary professional learning and practice. It contains invited contributions, coordinated and edited by Dr. Paul Gibbs (Middlesex University in England). Although I wrote the first chapter, titled Transdisciplinary Knowledge Creation, I think I can share an objective review of the book.

This 200-page book contains an …

6/16 – The Nicolescuian and Zurich Approaches to Transdisciplinarity

Peer Reviewed Articles / April - June 2015

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Sue L. T. McGregor PhD Professor Emerita (MSVU)

Introduction

Despite a “plurality of transdisciplinary models” (Nicolescu, 2008c, p. 13), the full range of transdisciplinarity has not yet been fully grasped and tabulated (du Plessis, Sehume, & Martin, 2013; Jahn, 2012). However, two approaches to transdisciplinary tend to prevail: (a) the Nicolescuian approach and (b) the Zurich approach (Klein, 2004, McGregor, 2014, 2015; Nicolescu, 2006, 2008c; Nowonty, 2003). People tend to cite one or the other of …

4/7 – Basarab Nicolescu. From modernity to cosmodernity: Science, culture, and spirituality.

Book Reviews / April - June 2015

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Basarab Nicolescu. (2014). From modernity to cosmodernity: Science, culture, and spirituality. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-4963-0 or Kindle version.

Sue L T. McGregor

From Modernity to Cosmodernity

I am very familiar with Basarab Nicolescu’s formulation of transdisciplinarity, having been a keen student of his approach for over a decade. I have a deep respect for the brilliance and the quantum nuances of his approach. And I was not disappointed; this is a profound and groundbreaking book. I did take …

1/15 – Integral Dispositions and Transdisciplinary Knowledge Creation

Continuous Learning / January-February 2015

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Sue L. T. McGregor

The world is facing a polycrisis of complex problems – a cacophony of irreversible climate change and ecological imbalance, global pandemics, escalating terrorism, conflict and aggression, unsustainable consumerism, debilitating poverty, reoccurring political and economic crises, worrying population growth and migration, uneven wealth and income distribution, uneven and unsustainable growth and development, insecurity on many levels – the litany goes on.

These are all wicked messes, problems so named because they are not …

4/1 – The Transdisciplinary Meme

Feature Articles / April- June 2014

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Sue L.T. McGregor

This article introduces the idea of creating and spreading a transdisciplinarity meme (herein called the TDMeme). After defining meme, an overview of a recent attempt to meme map climate change will be shared (Karafiath & Brewer, 2013). Then, the model emerging from this memeatic strategy will be used to introduce the idea of a TDMeme. The TDMeme would help spread the idea of bringing a transdisciplinary approach to address the wicked problems …