People as learners succeed when they identify their interests, their convictions, and strengths and weaknesses in daily life. To that end, I have students engage writing-journal assignments with the narrow lens of ART SCIENCE PHILOSOPHY RELIGION so that they self-recognize, identify their inner-workings, their interests. Individual and group assignments always encourage students to reflect upon personal and others-centered educational interests.

Look at the diversity in the classroom, for example, and classroom management to see how identifying ART SCIENCE PHILOSOPHY RELIGION are always directly in our midst. When we say that we respect each other’s beliefs, and so reference the diverse religious traditions among us, what we are saying is that we respect each other’s beliefs, each other’s core values and traditions that speak from their conscience and inform their behavior.

Classroom management, I suggest, becomes a matter of seeing each other better, identifying their innate or observable interests in the four disciplines. When our student artist appropriately self-identifies, when students become aware of themselves and each other, student classroom management becomes an appropriate response to who each student really is.

A brief introduction to the four disciplines is that ART has to do with aesthetics, creative expression. SCIENCE has to do with measures, observable patterns. PHILOSOPHY has to do with words, language, communication. RELIGION has to do with beliefs, convictions, conscience, interpreted meaning. These disciplines are discoverable in the classroom when we look for them. For example, if we ask students to read something, that’s philosophical practice and we can observe individual student interest by their behaviors. If we ask them to think about what they read, now can observe their interest of examining their own intellect, what their conscience says to them about the content: that’s in the realm of religion in the academic sense; they are forced to look into themselves, identify their values, their core convictions. The artist looks for beauty within the assigned reading while the philosopher naturally gravitates to word meaning. All of these are discoverable for the purpose of identifying ways to reach each of the students, across topics, granting their legitimate interests and abilities.

I have examined this framework for more than twenty-five years and found it useful for interpreting interests, learning preferences, and interpersonal interactions. Applications for classroom instruction and learning through the lens of the four disciplines become an imperative because student growth and development according to who they are is the imperative. Here’s a bit more of what it looks like.

First Day of Class – Practical Application

There are four walls in the classroom, and if I designate a quarter of the walls each for respective ART SCIENCE PHILOSOPHY RELIGION, then I am betrayed as a scientist; the artists seek beauty in my arrangement, the philosophers have something to say about it, and the revelators are contemplating it. I suggest it is imperative to be mindful of the disciplines so that the diverse interests and expressions of the students receive fair consideration. Can you see it? There is not a fifth discipline, not another discipline that stands alone, contributes alone.

Apply the four disciplines to rendering and assessing journal-writing assignments, for example. During my 45-hour practicum at elementary school, I noticed that students routinely volunteered to share their journal entries, volunteering a bit about their weekend according to what interested them. However, because self-identification as artist, scientist, philosopher, and revelator had not been curated, each student’s entry sounded similar to the others in naming a birthday party, eating out, or the company they kept. As students learn to write more specifically about their interests, I suggest individual preference to specific academic coursework will betray their innate abilities, individual strong points and weak ones. This has high applicability toward improving our national, state, and local education and assessment.

National, State, and Local Education and Assessment

As I read the popular “Introduction to Teaching: Becoming a Professional (7th ed.),” I noticed that the authors expressed continued concern about academic accountability, testing, and inequitable skill development. I suggest that identification of student interest early assists instructors and students to tailor the learning experience. Presently, STEM, for example, disguises artistic, creative, designing within engineering. I propose highlighting the aesthetics of engineering to make it user-friendly to budding artists. Arts and crafts assignments, for example, require decent eye-hand coordination, which is artistic expression. So, in my math lecture, I highlighted the beauty of signs and symbols, the attractiveness of orderly formulas, show the ebb and flow of equations. An artist that appreciates the beauty of equations might be a surgeon.

In summary, when we incorporate the discipline of religion appropriately within academia, identifying “religion” as the beliefs that we say that we respect, the convictions that we hold close, perceived knowledge, then we have a core component of the disciplines that speak into each other; they inform one another as they teach us about ourselves. Teaching and learning get narrowed, manageable in the classroom for student interest and ability. National, State, and local education and assessment will improve, I suggest, but it takes the work that we put into art, science, philosophy, and religion as we discover, affirm, and tailor to student interests and abilities.

Kauchak, Don, and Paul Eggen. Introduction to Teaching: Becoming a Professional. 7th ed., Pearson, 2020.