Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies Volume 28 (2010)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10323/3993

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    Editors' Introduction
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2010) Lenoir, Yves; Klein, Julie Thompson
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    Following the Yellow Brick Road: Interdisciplinary Practices in the Land of Oz
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2010) Lenoir, Yves; Klein, Julie Thompson
    This article explores the history and development of interdisciplinarity within the Australian context. Conditions and circumstances for the emergence of interdisciplinary approaches are explored with discussion identifying how these approaches impact and shape national curriculum, teachers’ practice and pedagogy. Policies, proposals, and debate are continuing to call for interdisciplinary practices that make the curricula relevant, significant and focused on the needs of all Australians for the present and in the future. Examples of interdisciplinary practices provide an overview of how interdisciplinarity is embedded within school structures and education discourse across Australia.
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    In Search of Interdisciplinarity in Schools in France: From Curriculum to Practice
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2010) Lenoir, Yves; Klein, Julie Thompson
    Interdisciplinary processes are being developed for a better present and future in primary and secondary education teaching in France. Over the past few years, the education authorities have increased incentives to open the subjects for one another and created new teaching-learning programs for interdisciplinary purposes. In spite of the obvious determination from the Ministère, the results of research on daily practices, as well as most of the official reports, show that the teachers of primary and secondary schools experience real challenges in implementing truly interdisciplinary teaching-learning activities.
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    Interdisciplinarity and Research on Local Issues in Schools: Policies and Experiences from Colombia
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2010) Lenoir, Yves; Klein, Julie Thompson
    This article examines education policy on curricular integration and interdisciplinary practices in primary and secondary education (K-11) in Colombia. It presents an overview of institutional and teachers’ discourses and practices concerning this subject, based on empirical work that was done in Bogotá. Finally, it presents a cooperative research project undertaken by 16 schools and a university that aimed to transform the curriculum with interdisciplinary projects focused on local issues. The conclusion reached is that, despite the complexity inherent in these kinds of projects, it is possible to mobilize people and use knowledge to transform the school, giving it new meaning and enriching its ties to its surroundings and the world.
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    Interdisciplinarity in Quebec Schools: 40 Years of Problematic Implementation
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2010) Lenoir, Yves; Klein, Julie Thompson
    This article presents a portrait of interdisciplinarity in the Quebec school system. Following a contextual overview of this system, including its sociohistorical evolution and current organization in order to define the problem of interdisciplinarity, a second section, beginning with a clarification of terms related to interdisciplinarity, explores the evolution of the concept over the course of the six curricula that have succeeded one another since the beginning of the 20th century, before describing the place of interdisciplinarity in this system. The third section presents the results of research conducted since 1985 on the discourse of primary school teachers concerning interdisciplinarity and its implementation in the classroom. Teacher conceptions and practices related to interdisciplinarity, as well as the place and function they ascribe to it, are dealt with in the next section. Finally, section four presents the results of a recent study on interdisciplinarity at the secondary school level. In the conclusion, we highlight, among other things, the central place given by teachers to socialization, as well as their limited consideration for teaching disciplinary knowledge.
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    Interdisciplinarity in Swiss Schools: A Difficult Step into the Future
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2010) Lenoir, Yves; Klein, Julie Thompson
    Multi- and interdisciplinary education is a major postulate in the Swiss school system and has considerable weight in educational programs and learning objectives, both in compulsory school and at the upper secondary school level. However, materializing this postulate still poses problems at the political and institutional level, where the fragmentation of educational system due to Switzerland’s federal structure does not foster wide-scale reform; in certain programs at the secondary school level, where disciplinary logic remains predominant; and in teachers’ everyday practice, which is only slowly adopting an interdisciplinary posture. Following a presentation of the specifics of the Swiss educational system and an attempt to define the notion of interdisciplinarity, this contribution will offer an analysis of developments in the discourse surrounding interdisciplinarity in Switzerland from the 1970s onwards and present the most noteworthy initiatives in this field.
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    Interdisciplinarity in U.S. Schools: Past, Present, and Future
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2010) Lenoir, Yves; Klein, Julie Thompson
    This article examines the historical evolution of the concepts of interdisciplinarity and integration in American education. We first focus on United States education in the 20th century to review the rationales for integrated and interdisciplinary primary and secondary education. We place such rationales in the context of the larger purposes attributed to education given societal changes and intellectual developments that characterized the times. Then we turn our attention to today’s educational landscape and new contemporary demands on education imposed by fundamental global, digital, and environmental transformations. Here, too, we place interdisciplinary education in the broader context of emerging trends in American life— recognizing that such trends are present and may take distinct forms in other countries.
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    Interdisciplinary Practices in Ontario: Past, Present, and Future
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2010) Lenoir, Yves; Klein, Julie Thompson
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    The Choice of Interdisciplinarity in French Agricultural Education
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2010) Lenoir, Yves; Klein, Julie Thompson
    Agricultural education very early on tested a generalized mandate of modular interdisciplinary education. In this regard, it constitutes an interesting medium for observing the conditions required for developing interdisciplinarity in an academic context. Based on a historical approach, this text shows how a series of experiments led to a generalized mandate of interdisciplinary education in the whole of training concerned, as well as the questions raised by this generalization. Analyzing the discrepancy between the prescription and declared or observed interdisciplinary teaching practices leads, in the conclusion, to a series of hypotheses on the obstacles encountered.
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    The Conception and Role of Interdisciplinarity in the Spanish Education System
    (Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2010) Lenoir, Yves; Klein, Julie Thompson
    This article provides an overview of the role that interdisciplinarity plays in the Spanish education system. With this aim, we first describe the main conception of the term interdisciplinarity in texts written in Spanish, including other terms that have similar meaning. Then we review the role of interdisciplinarity in the Spanish curriculum at different levels of education, focusing fundamentally on compulsory education. This serves as the basis from which later to analyze Spanish research on interdisciplinarity. Finally, through results of this research and some examples of interdisciplinary school practices, we extract conclusions about the role of interdisciplinarity in teaching practices in the classroom.