According to the University of Calgary Galileo Project, interdisciplinary inquiry might be described as studies that 'involve combining disciplines or subjects together in new ways in order to answer a question or solve a problem that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using the approaches or methods of only one discipline or subject. It’s about more than mixing and matching topics; it’s about problem solving.' They go on to note that 'Much research has shown that the most creative thinkers are those people who can make links between different areas of study, thought, commerce, arts etc. For example Prof Sir Ken Robinson says, “Creativity depends on interactions between feeling and thinking, and across different disciplinary boundaries and fields of ideas” . It is these sorts of creative thinkers that are most valued in business, politics, media, creative industries, engineering, research etc.' (2015-  https://inquiry.galileo.org/ch2/interdisciplinary/)

In fact, much creative inquiry will be interdisciplinary as the practices of the Arts are used to address questions and problems also raised by, for example, Science or the Humanities and Social Sciences, and express answers in their chosen Art form. Similarly, UNESCO's Seoul Agenda for Arts education notes 'The Arts in most, if not all, cultures are integral to life: function, creation and learning are intertwined. The Arts holds the potential to being fundamentally instrumental, in both formal and non-formal ways, as vehicles of knowledge and the methods of learning different disciplines.'

It is important that student works submitted for assessment in the ACT Senior Secondary system are reliable and valid measures of student attainment.  In the current context, generative AI makes measuring student attainment much more complicated than it was previously. Generative AI can compose music, write out choreography,  generate original images, and compose original creative and critical texts, or at least as originally as most students can manage. 

There is some fall back in the Arts as ultimately, students will need to produce a concrete outcome- perform or make. However, the intellectual and creative engagement that our courses require from students can be falsified. It will be important to ensure that the course are still taught and students learn key disciplinary concepts and skills.  

This suggests that care needs to taken around the conditions for assessment when students produce compositions, choreography, scripts, reflections, artist statements and analyses of works. Consider whether unplugged/ and or supervised contexts for composition and creating choreography might be required. Consider if final self-analyses of work and process would be most reliable if  written in class under test conditions. Consider if process-oriented writing in process journals should be periodically written in class with the teacher circulating to validate authenticity.  Consider the value of interview tasks about works, for example, two teachers interview a student about their work/performance after the completion of it. 

Equally, students should be carefully taught how to use the AI capabilities legitimately as a sub-editor or provider of research and ideas. One way is to provide allowable prompts/ stems of prompts. Another is to carefully teach the principles of academic integrity. Another is to interrogate the quality of work produced by AI. It is also a fascinating topic in artistic ethics for research and discussion, with the unauthorised scraping of artistic endeavour and the implications for careers going forward.   

Please also consider that some students will have more access to AI assistance in the Arts because they can pay for subscription sites and platforms that provide better and less obviously AI products. 

AI can also be made integral to the task.  Generative AI can be used as a part of the creative process to help generate ideas and inspire thoughts. Students can be taught to use AI to help them visualise concepts, test ideas and experiment with different styles. This may help them by stopping them going down unproductive pathways or spending hours on something that was not what they intended. 

Researchers, such a Professor Genevieve Bell, have commented on the value of increased numbers of iterations of making and evaluation cycles in improving the final product that can come out of working constructively with AI.  If this is integrated into the task, recorded in the process journal and interrogated in summative  evaluation tasks, it can be a valuable addition to the creative process. 

There is an online workshop on AI available:  https://sites.google.com/ed.act.edu.au/aiworkshop/home 

There is also a course on Ethical Research Principles and Guidelines, which also includes the requirement for genuine and original research:

https://sites.google.com/ed.act.edu.au/introduction-to-the-bsss-ethic/home/responsibilities-of-institutions