Conference Agenda

In this presentation, we present a chapter published in the anthology Developing a Didactic Framework Across and Beyond School Subjects (Klausen & Mård, 2023). In the chapter, we examined crosscurricular teacher collaboration, meaning that teachers with different subject affiliations develop the curriculum and teach together. Recent trends suggest that many international and national policy documents expect crosscurricular teacher collaboration but leave it to the schools and teachers to organize the efforts. Policymakers and school leaders sometimes set overly optimistic goals for crosscurricular teacher collaboration and expect it to enhance a range of matters, such as teachers’ professional and school development, student learning, and professional learning communities (Horn et al., 2017; Lysberg, 2022).

The chapter aimed to revise a didactic model for crosscurricular teaching developed by the authors (Mård & Hilli, 2020). The model provides a didactic framework by highlighting factors relevant for crosscurricular teaching on school and classroom levels, called decisional (subjects, competences, values and aims of education, student needs and interests, contemporary issues, and methods) and conditional (curriculum, collaboration, and school culture) factors. The model is framed by Didaktik theories, which respect teacher autonomy and cultural and political contexts of education but lack concepts for teacher collaboration. In the first version, we did not further examine collaboration, as it was one of many important factors raised in the empirical cases analyzed. In this chapter, we revised the didactic model while considering crosscurricular teacher collaboration, its potential and pitfalls.

Topic:

Since 2019, secondary education in Flanders is being gradually reformed (Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, 2023). In particular, this reform stimulates interdisciplinarity in various ways and gives individual schools a lot of freedom in how to organize the concrete realization of the curriculum in a specific school. While mandatory learning goals before the reform where listed under well-defined school subjects that had to be implemented as such, legal learning requirements are now listed as groups of competencies not anymore associated to the obligation to organize learning based on specific school subjects. This implies that Flemish schools today can choose to work with traditional school subjects, interdisciplinary clusters, projects, seminars or other organizations of teaching and learning. As a result, in the last years a multitude of school-based, interdisciplinary practices with an experimental character arose in Flemish secondary schools, providing a very interesting context for didactical research with focus on interdisciplinarity.

Objective:

In a Flemish qualitative study, we engaged in short-term ethnographies of cases considered to be interdisciplinary by local school actors, and we coupled the observations to the study of the relevant reformed curricula. The cases included both general and vocational secondary education, for school subjects within the domains of STEM, the arts, and broad integrated clusters.

Our work aimed at achieving a rich, complex description of the teaching taking place in the newly arisen interdisciplinary contexts within the reformed curricula. In particular, we have identified common emergent didactic features characterizing the observed ‘modernized’ interdisciplinary didactics.

Conceptual or theoretical framework:

While seminal papers classified at a theoretical level the many ways in which interdisciplinary curricula can be constructed and organized combining elements from different subjects (Fogarty, 1991) and how this shapes instruction (Lederman & Niess, 1997) (Nikitina, 2006), the recent changes in the Flemish secondary school system suggest a different perspective: to consider interdisciplinarities as complex and diverse educational practices, to be studied as such by suitable research approaches and methods (Tamassia, Ardui & Frenssen, 2023).

Engaging in ethnography in contexts considered to be interdisciplinary by local school actors allowed us to experience, describe and analyze interdisciplinarities as practices in today’s modernized secondary schools. In particular, we could observe interdisciplinary didactics in its full complexity, involving new spaces, times, things, people and gestures.

Ethnographic approaches in interdisciplinary educational contexts have been previously used for instance to gather information on perspectives of teachers on interdisciplinarity, within a framework where the implementation of well-defined interdisciplinary instruction was the underlying background (McBee, 1996). An ethnographic approach had been previously taken for the study of educational practices with a specific focus on the materiality of education (Roehl, 2012), highlighting the contribution of things to classroom practices seen as complex, interwoven assemblages.

In our study, we took the perspective of studying interdisciplinarities as rich, diverse and situated didactical practices in schools.

Research questions:

- What common aspects or elements arise (if present at all) from the analysis of the ethnographic descriptions of the studied practices, that can be associated with their being ‘interdisciplinary’?

- Which of the identified common features are didactical in nature? How can ‘modernized interdisciplinary didactics’ be characterized, as observed in the studied cases?

European relevance:

While our research has been focusing on interdisciplinarity as stimulated in Flemish secondary schools by a local reform, a similar trend is present in other European countries (see for instance the case of Finland (FNBE, 2016)), and has been driven by European policy (EC - European Political Strategy Centre, 2017). For this reason, our approach and results can be relevant for researchers in other European countries.

Topic:

Many European countries are currently facing a shortage of teachers and a high teacher drop-out, including Flemish Belgium (European Commission, 2020, 2023). This complex issue is often looked at from the perspective of the (lack of) attractiveness of the teacher career (OECD, 2019; Macdonald, 1999), or from the perspective of organisational psychology, see for instance (Madigan, Kim, 2021; Thomas et al., 2018). Behavioural issues with today’s youth are often also mentioned (Williams, 2018). The reasons given by (Flemish) teachers for having quit the job have also been studied (Struyven, Vanthournout, 2014).

In this context, a didactic perspective is rarely taken, although didactics is central to the teaching profession.

In this presentation we will discuss four case studies focusing on young Flemish teachers experiencing pressure or dilemma’s that are essentially didactical. We will discuss how these teachers make specific didactical choices and accept certain compromises, finding a balance in their tense situation through didactics. This ‘balancing act’ allows them to cope with the tension in their didactic practice and to stay (for the moment being) in the teaching job.

The four cases are selected from a broader study, in the context of which we have collected, analysed and visualized diverse ‘tensions’ experienced by both senior and young teachers.

Conceptual or theoretical framework:

The underlying working hypothesis of the study is that the complexity of today’s teachers’ practice causes various forms of emotional tension. This ‘tense practice’ is to be considered inherent to the teaching job, and the capacity of the individual teacher to ‘handle’ tensions in a concrete way is crucial to the resilience of the teacher and his/her capacity to stay in the profession. By doing so, we take a positive perspective by studying not teachers who quitted the job, but teachers who manage to stay in the job ‘in between’ different tensions.

The complexity of the context into which teachers have to function today, implies that tense teachers’ practices need to be studied in their own complex context from different perspectives.

The actor-network theory is a theoretical framework allowing to study and visualize a complex issue from different perspectives (see for instance (Fenwick, Edwards, 2010) for the application to educational research). Therefore, this theory was suitable to provide a conceptual framework for the study and to inspire the methods we have used to map the tensions in their contexts.

Since the didactic perspective is rarely used to address the issue of today’s lack of well-being of teachers, we have selected the data where didactics plays a central role looking at these cases to identify and highlight didactic aspects that can be causing distress in teachers, and to see how teachers react within the realm of didactics.

Research questions:

General research questions of the broader study:

- What tensions do teachers experience in their practice?

- What is the context of the tension? (who, what, when, where, how)

- How does the teacher handle this tension or cope with it?

Specific research questions addressed in the presentation:

- Under which circumstances is a tension experienced by a teacher didactical in nature?

- Which concrete elements play a role in the way the collected didactic tensions arise and are handled by teachers?

- What concrete didactical choices do the studied teachers make to address or cope with the tension in their didactic practice?

Objective

The objective of this study is to identify potential aspects in didactics that might play a role in the complex issue of (young) teacher drop-off, and by doing so to contribute from a didactical point of view to a multi-perspective approach to this concerning European issue.