From the Middle School and High School Principal

 Parts and Wholes - the Junk Couture Middle School Interdisciplinary Day

Humans have a really odd relationship with thinking about parts and wholes - to such an extent, that to me it is almost like a 'flaw' in the way our minds and consciousness have evolved.  There are little thought experiments that reveal it.  A famous one is Zeno's paradox.

If you fire an arrow towards a target, it must pass through the halfway point.  From there towards the target it must pass through the halfway point.  From that point it must pass through the next halfway point.  So the question is, how long does it take to pass through an infinite number of halfway points?  Well, an infinite number of points by definition takes an infinite amount of time.  Therefore the arrow never reaches the target.  The problem is we can't understand the relationship between parts and a continuous whole - and we don't know if time or space are either, or both.  And it shows.

The more modern and scientifically proven example is that if you send photons of light through two thin slits 'one at a time' (or at least measure them, so you know it was one discrete photon) they land on the wall like this:

The only way they could land on the wall in that pattern is if they 'knew' they were part of a wave, as it is a wave diffraction pattern, like you get when two waves are created around a post in the sea and hit a seawall behind it.  Particles don't experience diffraction patterns - it's impossible.  But you measured them as a photon, so there is no way they could also be a wave.  The strange thing is the way you 'watch' them determines how they behave as 'part' or 'whole'.  Bohr recognised that this not because they 'become' one or the other, but because they are ontologically indeterminate.  They are 'both/and' and only determined by us looking at them for our purposes (Heisenberg found this hard to accept, and wanted to make it our uncertainty, not the indeterminate nature of reality.  See Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway for more on this).  If we stop looking at them (we can experimentally prove this by using two sets of splits), they resume their indeterminate status.   The universe is not unknown, in terms of whether it is made of parts or wholes, it is both/and in an indetermined state.  When we look at something we make it assume a state temporarily. Bohr said that if that does not utterly shock you, then you haven't understood. So we humans think in parts and wholes.  The universe doesn't.  It thinks in terms of 'both / and', much like Daoists do.

We think of learning like this.  Learning is both parts -  knowledge and skills (doing simultaneous equations) and wholes - disciplines like 'maths'.  

Meaningful real world learning is both parts - disciplines like Maths; and wholes - interdisciplinary projects. 

An IB Education is about this relationship.  

We see this in the IB Core and Theory of knowledge which bring together all the ways of knowing of the  6 IB Diploma disciplines to consider what that means for how we know the world around us and how we create new knowledge.  We see it in things like our YPI projects in grade 9 and 10 Global Perspectives.  At MYP we study the 8 subjects which represent the major ways of understanding the world humans have developed as disciplines (the parts), but we then do interdisciplinary projects and units (the whole).  This week we had the amazing Junk Couture fashion show, where students used their knowledge of the disciplines (maths, design, arts, language and literature, material science, etc.) to create a Junk Couture from recycled materials, and a Logo, brand and fashion show to bring it all together.

There are some photos for you to enjoy below.  It was a great 'part whole' coming together, and despite what Zeno says, I think it hit the mark.