Conference Agenda

The symposium aims at highlighting how currently changing societal conditions impact crosscurricular teaching and how they can be addressed didactically. Crosscurricular teaching is in perpetual demand, but how it is justified and what it is expected to do is constantly changing, often because of changing societal conditions (Klausen & Mård, 2024). Research on crosscurricular teaching must be sensitive to this and focus on didactical methods and conceptions that are responsive to the evolving circumstances.

The current age is marked by digitalization and the growing use of AI, a global mental health crisis among young people (Lancet 2022; Schweizer et al., 2023), an increasingly unstable world order and violent conflicts, political polarization and a general climate of uncertainty and unpredictability. Popular topics for crosscurricular teaching, like sustainability and democratic citizenship, remain centrally important, but the changing political, cultural and technological landscape makes it necessary to approach them in new ways. Polarized views, diverse student populations and shifting impressions of what and who are good or bad make it increasingly difficult, but also increasingly important, to teach topics related to politics, societal cohesion and international conflicts. The current state of polycrisis engenders a still stronger need for educational approaches that link different subjects, but this also creates new didactical challenges. And the general climate of uncertainty affects teacher wellbeing and conditions for teacher collaboration (Ekornes, 2017).

The symposium will discuss how these changing conditions affect crosscurricular teaching, creating new tasks and opportunities, and which didactic responses are available and appropriate. The participants will present cases that provide empirical evidence of the impact of changing conditions and suggestions for fitting research approaches and concrete didactical methods. The symposium will focus particularly on the following (interconnected) issues:

i) Crosscurricular didactics for the digital age. This includes both the use of digital technology (especially AI and VR) and teaching for skills related to digital life (how to cultivate a responsible use of digital technology that also supports students’ personal and academic development, understood as a crosscurricular teaching task)

ii) Crosscurricular teaching and the youth wellbeing crisis. This includes the question of how to treat wellbeing and life skills as crosscurricular learning goals, integrating them in all school subjects and didactic decisions, but also the question of how different kinds of guidance counselling can be conceived as a crosscurricular educational activity and developed so as to address the wellbeing crisis and students worries about their future life.

iii) Sustainability, international politics and democracy teaching under changing political and cultural conditions. Political support for the green agenda has been fading, as concerns for security, competitiveness and national interests have taken centre stage. International conflicts like the Gaza war have made teaching of history and international politics complex, controversial and emotional. Crosscurricular didactics must find ways to deal with this situation and balance ideal teaching goals with concerns for feasibility and students’ emotional investments.

iv) Responsive didactics: How can crosscurricular didactics help teachers respond to unforeseen events, like sudden changes in the world situation or the emergence of new technologies, and keep their crosscurricular teaching fresh and timely and exploit new possibilities for motivation and engagement?

v) Crosscurricular collaboration under changing conditions: The new, more comprehensive and dynamic approaches to crosscurricular teaching that are called for require still more collaboration between teachers. This makes it particularly pertinent to develop forms of collaboration that can persist also under changing and difficult conditions.

The conditions for crosscurricular teaching: A model of integration of subject-based curriculum Integration of knowledge from multiple fields is needed in a world filled with complex problems. However, for a coherent and profound understanding of the complex phenomena, integration has to be structured in a way that identifies the role of disciplinary knowledge as the most reliable knowledge that we as humanity have been able to construct about the world (Young, 2008). Integration is important also for learning disciplinary knowledge, so that the learning process can produce sequences, which is a basic idea of constructivist theory of learning The question of curriculum integration has been on the table of educational discussions since the early days of modern schooling. It is a question that recurrently gains attention but fades into the background because of the challenges it brings along (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). The challenges include the lack of teacher knowledge and expertise, insufficient time and resources to plan and implement integrative teaching, subject hierarchies and power struggles between the subjects, and curriculum structures that do not support integration (Burke & Lehane, 2023). This presentation aims to tackle some of the challenges by developing a model of integration of subject-based curriculum. The model helps us to understand what the conditions of crosscurricular teaching are, and to think how teachers’ and students’ work of integration can be supported by curricular structures. The model, that draws especially from the work of Basil Bernstein (1977), recognizes four phases of integration: 1) when the subjects are designed, 2) within the subjects, 3) between the subjects, and 4) between the subjects and students’ lifeworlds. The model acknowledges knowledge integration as dynamics with differentiation. In other words, crossing of curricular boundaries is preceded by the construction of the boundaries. An essential question concerning the curriculum structures is, where and how to lay the boundaries (Niemelä, 2021).

Bernstein, B. (1977). On the classification and framing of educational knowledge. In Class, Codes and Control, vol. 3: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions (2nd ed., pp. 85–115). Routledge & Kegan Paul. Burke, P., & Lehane, P. (2023). Conceptualising Curriculum Integration: A Synthesis of Theory, Research and Practice. National Council for Curriculum and Assessment. Niemelä, M. A. (2021). Crossing curricular boundaries for powerful knowledge. Curriculum Journal, 32(2), 359–375. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.77 Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. Harvard University Press. Young, M. F. D. (2008). Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education. Routledge.

The presentation explores how guidance counselling in school must be conceived and practiced as a crosscurricular, didactic activity aimed at students’ Bildung, i.e. their general personal development, to adequately address challenges related to the current age of uncertainty, especially the adolescent wellbeing crises. Guidance counselling has been defined as ‘the process of helping individuals discover and develop their educational, vocational, and psychological potentialities’ (Britannica, 2005). Kettunen (2024) distinguished three curriculum models of guidance counselling: as a separate subject, as an element of other subjects, or across the entire curriculum. In school settings, however, guidance counselling is usually seen as a specialised task classified into two types: study guidance as a specific school subject and general guidance in the studies. Guidance counselling often remains narrowly focused on academic aspects of school performance or opportunities for future studies and work, despite a growing interest among policymakers and scholars in seemingly more comprehensive approaches (Kettunen, Lee & Vuorinen, 2020); and it is often relegated to specialised advisors. We argue that guidance counselling should be made a pervasive element in teaching and school culture to ensure the harmonious development of all aspects of students’ personalities. Students’ wellbeing should be a central concern of education, as mental health issues among adolescents are on the rise in most parts of the world. We present findings from a study that is empirically anchored in an analysis of how guidance counselling has been implemented at different levels of Finnish national curriculum frameworks for comprehensive and general upper secondary education. We also consider to what extent our Bildung-based conception of guidance counselling is cross-culturally viable (Yuen, 2008).

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2005, May 12). Guidance counselling. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/guidance-counselling Kettunen, J., Lee, J., & Vuorinen, R. (2020). Exploring Finnish Guidance Counselors’ Conceptions of Career Management Skills. Sage Open, 10(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244020968778 Kettunen, J. (2024). Finnish Lower Secondary Career Education Through a Systems Lens. Nordic Journal of Transitions, Careers and Guidance. 5(1), 73–85. https://doi.org/10.16993/njtcg.85 Yuen, M. (2008). School Counselling: Current International Perspectives. Asian Journal of Counselling, 15(2), 103–116.

This presentation examines how integrative teaching and learning is framed in Finnish primary teacher education curricula and how these framings relate to practicing teachers’ conceptions. Integrative approaches that cross subject boundaries have received increasing attention in educational research and policy in relation to changing societal conditions. In Finland, the absence of a national teacher education curriculum grants universities considerable autonomy in curriculum design, making it relevant to examine how integrative teaching and learning is conceptualized across institutions and how these conceptualizations are reflected in teachers’ understandings. The analysis draws on two complementary empirical data sources. First, compulsory course curricula from all eight Finnish universities providing primary teacher education, including filial units (ten curricula in total), are examined using inductive and abductive content analysis. This analysis focuses on how integrative teaching and learning is described and conceptually framed in curriculum texts, the distribution of integrative approaches across course categories, and patterns of curricular coherence within and between institutions. Second, questionnaire data from practicing basic education teachers (N = 129) is analyzed using descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis to explore how teachers conceptualize integrative teaching and learning in their professional practice. The findings indicate variation in how integrative teaching and learning is framed in teacher education curricula, ranging from more theory-flexible approaches to theory-driven approaches, including multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary orientations. Teachers’ conceptions similarly reflect diverse interpretations of integration, which point to challenges in translating integrative principles into classroom practice. By bringing together curriculum analysis and teachers’ perspectives, this presentation contributes to symposium discussions on the relationships between teacher education curricula and professional practice. The analysis offers an empirically grounded perspective on how integrative teaching and learning is conceptualized across primary teacher education and basic education, and supports comparative reflection on curriculum coherence and teacher preparation in different contexts.

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