Conference Agenda

Education in an age of uncertainty cannot be confined to individual school subjects. To prepare for the future and respond to the current environmental and societal crises, teaching must move across and beyond the subjects, highlighting relationships between different topics and fostering students’ ability and readiness to act (cf. Savage, 2011). Yet despite a widespread recognition of this on a policy level, there is a profound lack of theoretical foundations and practical guidelines for cross- and transcurricular teaching.

The newly published anthology Developing a didactic framework across and beyond school subjects (Routledge, 2023) attempts to fill this gap, based on a contemporary version of the Bildung tradition. The symposium presents key contributions to the book, covering both the general didactic principles and particularly important topics like education for democratic citizenship, the integration of bodily movement in education across the curriculum, and how to unfold the potential for Bildung and crosscurricular teaching of the often-neglected subject of craft. Acknowledging that crosscurricular teaching might be challenging and controversial, the symposium will also facilitate an open discussion about which didactics is most appropriate for crosscurricular teaching in this age of uncertainty and how to handle the practical challenges it gives rise to.

This presentation outlines the theoretical basis for an inclusive and flexible approach to crosscurricular teaching. It demonstrates how the classical conception of Bildung and its more recent developments can support a wide range of aims and goals of teaching and show them to be interrelated. Specifically, it argues that the concern for fostering competences, meeting societal needs, and answering societal challenges is compatible with ideals of self-cultivation and critical and non-conformist thinking. It uses the idea of Bildung to strike a balance between the need to relate to students’ personal interests and lifeworld and the importance of observing transpersonal constraints grounded in disciplinary knowledge and societal norms and challenges. Grounded on the idea of crossing curricular boundaries to enhance the overall cultivation of students, and being sensitive to the conditions of schools and teachers, we suggest the terms crosscurricular and transcurricular as a conceptual framework for education across and beyond school subjects. The commonly used concepts multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity, are problematized as being more related to disciplinary collaboration than school teaching. Since our framework is based on the tradition of Bildung-centred Didaktik, we use the term curriculum in a broad and neutral sense (cf. the tradition of curriculum studies). We use it to refer to the totality of school subjects – for example, mathematics, history, English, foreign languages, music, arts, and social studies – in a given institutional context. Hence the terms crosscurricular and transcurricular designate different ways of teaching across or beyond the institutionalized or traditional school subjects. This is not only in line with a common usage of the term curriculum (Goodlad et al., 1979; Young, 2014), but also reflects recent developments within educational research and practice (Krogh et al., 2021).

Goodlad, J. I., Klein, M. F. & Tye, K. A. (1979). The domains of curriculum and their study. In J. I. Goodlad (Ed.), Curriculum inquiry. The story of curriculum practice (pp. 43–76). McGraw-Hill. Klausen, S. H. & Mård, N. (2023). Rationale and aims of crosscurricular teaching and learning: For life, knowledge, and work. In S. H. Klausen & N. Mård (Eds.), Developing a didactic framework across and beyond school subjects: Cross- and transcurricular teaching (pp. 19-32). Routledge Research in Education. Krogh, E., Qvortrup, A. & Graf, S. T. (Eds.), (2021). Didaktik and curriculum in ongoing dialogue. Routledge. Mård, N. & Klausen, S. H. (2023). Speaking and thinking about crosscurricular teaching: terms, concepts, and conceptions. In S. H. Klausen & N. Mård (Eds.), Developing a didactic framework across and beyond school subjects: Cross- and transcurricular teaching (pp. 7-18). Routledge Research in Education. Young, M. (2014). What is a curriculum and what can it do? The Curriculum Journal, 25(1), 7–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2014.902526

This presentation examines the prerequisites for Bildung-oriented and crosscurricular, taking the experiences from Denmark over the past 20 years as the starting point. What didactical challenges do these experiences point to, and how can they be understood from a theoretical perspective? To answer these questions, the intentions behind the 2005-reform of the Danish Upper Secondary School-system is presented. Then three cases are presented and analyzed and discussed based on a theoretical reflection on Bildung-oriented and crosscurricular teaching. It is argued that Bildung-oriented teaching must be crosscurricular, that it must be nonaffirmative, and that it must position students as actors who construct knowledge about epochal key problems. This type of teaching will enable students to empower themselves and be authoritative citizens in a democratic society.

Hobel, P. (2023). Crosscurricular work and Bildung: Empowering the students. In S. H. Klausen & N. Mård (Eds.), Developing a didactic framework across and beyond school subjects: Cross- and transcurricular teaching (pp. 33-46). Routledge Research in Education.

We address the issue of cross-curricular teaching and learning in mathematics education from different viewpoints and base our discussion on both theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence. A pivotal question is why school mathematics is frequently conceived as difficult to integrate with other subjects, sometimes even consciously left out when teachers plan for cross-curricular activities. We argue that the marginal position of mathematics within cross-curricular teaching and learning can be explained by the dominance of an instrumental view on mathematics and its learning. If mathematics education is instead viewed from a complementary perspective, from a relational view, we argue that a cross-curricular educational context could provide a meaningful, realistic setting in which to engage in doing mathematics and making learners’ mathematical knowledge less inert.

Braskén, M, Hemmi, K., Kurtén, B. (2019). Implementing a multidisciplinary curriculum in a Finnish lower secondary school – The perspective of science and mathematics. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 63(4), 1–17. Doig, B., & Jobling, W. (2019). Inter-disciplinary mathematics: Old wine in new bottles? In B. Doig, J. Williams, D. Swanson, R. Borromeo Ferri & D. Drake (Eds.), Interdisciplinary mathematics education, (pp. 245–255). Springer. Doig, B., Williams, J., Swanson, D., Borromeo Ferri, R., & Drake, D. (Eds.). (2019). Interdisciplinary mathematics education. Springer. McPhail, G. (2018). Curriculum integration in the senior secondary school: A case study in a national assessment context. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 50(1), 56–76. Meier, S. L., Cobbs, G., & Nicol, M. (1998). Potential benefits and barriers to integration. School Science and Mathematics, 98(8), 438–445. Röj-Lindberg, A-S., Braskén, M. & Berts, K-E. (2023). Mathematics across and beyond the curriculum. In S. H. Klausen & N. Mård (Eds.), Developing a didactic framework across and beyond school subjects: Cross- and transcurricular teaching (pp. 106-118). Routledge Research in Education.

This presentation explores how craft as a school subject can contribute to learning in a broader sense. The artifact sometimes overshadows the more abstract learning of the process (Borg, 2009). In the general discussion, it is often the practical benefits that are discussed, while craft teachers and researchers have a broader view of the subject’s learning potential. Different models and terminology have been developed to capture the breadth of learning, such as material and intangible learning, practical benefit and general knowledge, along with a focus on product and/or process. We present two models for learning, one for aesthetic subjects (Lindström, 2012) and one for crafts in teacher education (Huovila & Rautio, 2008). By analyzing the similarities and differences between the two models, a developed model for analyzing domains of learning for crosscurricular teaching takes shape. The new model is discussed with the help of a craft case. The aim of the model is to give the individual teacher and teaching team that works with crosscurricular teaching a tool helping them systematically analyze and make visible how learning in crafts, both on its own and in crosscurricular teaching, can contribute to Bildung.

Hartvik, J. & Porko-Hudd, M. (2023). Analyzing domains of learning for crosscurricular teaching —Educational crafts in focus. In S. H. Klausen & N. Mård (Eds.), Developing a didactic framework across and beyond school subjects: Cross- and transcurricular teaching (pp. 144-160). Routledge Research in Education. Huovila, R., & Rautio, R. (2008). Käsiksi käsityönopetukseen – nelikenttä käsityönopettajan ja opettajankouluttajan työvälineenä [Grasp craft teaching – the four-fielder as a teacher's and teacher-educator's tool]. In P. Kaikkonen (Ed.), Työ haastaa tutkimaan opettajien arkihavainnoista kokonaisuuksien ymmärtämiseen (125–140). Jyväskylän yliopisto. Lindström, L. (2012). Aesthetic learning about, in, with and through the arts: A curriculum study. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 31, 166–179. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.2012.01737.x