BULETIN ğTIIN IFIC - Universitatea George Bacovia

Shaping the practical role of a transdisciplinary higher education 31
In order to better explain their new approach to the triadic transaction among
education, education policy and business, the authors start from a new vision/paradigm of
human existence based on two fundamental features of reality. On the one hand, there is
the continuous existence of reality (thinking and acting included) and on the other hand,
there is the permanent and simultaneous flow of information, communication, interaction/
transaction between/ among all possible concrete (images of) levels of reality shaped by
(the cultural framework of) every individual. These two fundamental features should not be
confused. Even if, at first sight, they seem to be very similar, we underline the fact that the
former one (the continuous dimension of human existence) is derived from a spatial
dimension, whereas the latter one (the permanent flow of interactions among levels of
reality) is derived from the temporal dimension of human existence.
The interaction between the continuous space and the permanent and simultaneous
flow of transactions generates the transdisciplinary approach which happens in space and
time as a reality with a higher degree of complexity. When the modern thinking began to
study reality, it divided it into discrete forms called sciences/ disciplines/ specializations
with the negative result of lack of communication among all these scientific disciplines. As
a consequence, human mind (which functions as continuous processes, not discrete ones)
refused to accept this segmentation. This refusal created a new way of thinking, the socalled
postmodern or transmodern thinking forms 1 of existence: for example, trandisciplinarity,
transdevelopment and transnational political realities. In education (i.e. the
process of communicating different ways of understanding the reality and of transforming it
according to different criteria) this transition from a paradigm to another took different
forms, such as: learning by doing, learning by acting, action learning, learning by sharing,
experiential learning 2 etc.
The general concept of teaching is changed into a more general one of learning and
thus, the focus being transferred from the teacher to the student. This was a very
important stage in the development of education that prepared another one, namely the
transfer from student focused education to graduate focused education. This means a real
continuum of pedagogical skills which are simultaneously focused on the student and on
the graduate; which is, after all, a real challenge for (higher) education nowadays. The
authors of this paper do believe that the higher education process needs a radical
transformation determined by the new and future levels of reality.
This challenge is very well-served by the transdisciplinary approach 3 , and a quite
concrete application of this is EMMY 4 . At the moment, the authors apply this scientific tool
1 After some decades of debating on the usefulness or unusefulness of postmodern thinking, in the last years
the positive and generally accepted contributions of postmodern thinking have been gathered under the
name of transmodern thinking.
2 Each of these forms of learning/ teaching has its advantages and disadvantages, but the most important
thing is to fit one or another to the concrete objectives of the society where they are applied to. As a matter of
fact, this matching could be a result of applying EMMY (ends matched to means).
3 The theory on trandisciplinarity, developed by Basarab Nicolescu, “concerns that which is at once between
the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline” and characterized by three
features: the logic of the included third; levels of reality; complexity. For more information on
transdisciplinarity, the following book and paper are fundamental: Basarab, Nicolescu, A Manifesto of
Transdisciplinarity, State University of New York, New York, SUNY Press, 2002; The Transdisciplinary
Evolution of the University. Condition for Sustainable Development and Basarab Nicolescu, The
transdisciplinary evolution of learning, http://www.unesco.org/education/educprog /lwf/dl/nicolescu_f.pdf
4 EMMY is a transdiciplinary approach on human being, human existence and human thinking, based on
three former disciplines: politics, economics, ethics. In EMMY’s terminology, all this is, as a matter a fact, a
continuum of ends, means and their permanent matching. Of course, psychology, sociology, anthropology,