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.

Contemporary teaching must deal with digital tool use in several interrelated, but also contrasting ways, across the curriculum. While these tools offer unique opportunities for competence development, creativity, and inclusion, they also contribute to stress, distraction, and disengagement (Orben et al., 2024). Digital technologies shape how young people learn, socialize, and see themselves (Schraube et al., 2015). Teachers must be aware of and respond to these effects of digital technologies while themselves employing digital technology as learning tools. The presentation explores how digital tools (AI, VR, videogames, smartphones etc.) can be integrated into the broader learning spaces in ways that foster key skills and competences of children and adolescents, while also supporting their social and emotional needs. It argues that digital tool use is a crosscurricular concern also because it is closely related to students’ general personal development – their maturation (Koch et al., 2025), socialization and the fostering of their general skills and competences. Such an approach to digital personality formation or Bildung differs from received views of digital Bilding (Christensen, 2023) or ICT literacy (Riis, 2017; Aagaard, 2021) which, even when they include more than technical skills, remain narrowly focused on developing epistemic attitudes like a critical information seeking. An important concern for digital Bildung, especially with the advent of generative AI, is how to ensure that students are still sufficiently challenged and motivated to expand their horizon. Another is how to cope with the effects of digital media on students’ identity formation and emotions (Osler, 2024). But these must not remain abstract philosophical or mental health concerns; they must be reflected in actual didactics.

Aagard, J. (2021), The Care of Our Hybrid Selves: Towards a Concept of Bildung For Digital Times. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 55: 41-54. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12456 Christensen, B.A. On Digital Bildung: Raising a Critical Awareness of Digital Matters. Stud Philos Educ 42, 303–322 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09870-y Koch, T., Laaber, F., Arenas, A., & Florack, A. (2025). Socially (dis)connected in a connected world: The role of young people’s digital maturity. Computers in Human Behavior, 163, 108473. Orben, A., Meier, A., Dalgleish, T., & Blakemore, S.-J. (2024). Mechanisms linking social media use to adolescent mental health vulnerability. Nature Reviews Psychology, 3(6), 407–423. Osler, L. (2024). (Self-)Envy, Digital Technology, and Me. Topoi 43, 659-672 Riis, Søren. 2017a. ICT literacy: an imperative of the Twenty-First Century. Foundations of Science. 22(2): 385–394. Schraube, Ernst, Athanasios Marvakis. (2015). Frozen fluidity: Digital technologies and the transformation of students’ learning and conduct of everyday life. In Psychology and the conduct of everyday life, 205–225. London: Routledge

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In an increasingly complex knowledge society, general literacy development is essential for social participation and lifelong learning. However, students from low-SES backgrounds remain disproportionately at risk of low literacy and early school leaving (OECD, 2023). Powerful Learning Environment (PLE), which integrate basic literacy (e.g., reading, writing, arithmetic) and high literacy (e.g., critical thinking, problem solving) can mitigate this inequity (Arnou et al., 2025; Rakesh et al., 2025). In Flanders, students who have not yet achieved the goals of primary education by the age of twelve enter the remedial track in secondary education, aimed at closing this achievement gap. Although PLEs for these students should provide challenging learning activities in meaningful contexts and strengthen both basic and high literacy (Arnou et al., 2025), these principles are rarely observed in the remedial track (Van Peteghem et al., 2024). Therefore, this study investigated how PLEs can be implemented in this context. This multiple case study examines how teacher teams in three “successful” schools - defined by student performance on standardized tests and observed teaching quality - apply PLE principles in remedial secondary education. Interviews with teachers and focus groups with school leadership teams enabled an in depth analysis of how teaching practices interact with teacher working conditions (TWCs). Across the cases, the teachers sought to enhance student engagement through "meaningful contexts", operationalized through cross-curricular teaching. Although the schools differed in implementation form, frequency, and level of experience, they employ similar supporting working conditions, acknowledging the high demands of cross-curricular teaching. Teachers emphasized that collaboration - both within and across schools - was essential. In class support from colleagues was identified as a key lever, extending beyond its traditional function in adaptive teaching and classroom management to scaffold more integrated and complex learning activities. This in-class support both depended on and reinforced professional trust, shared responsibility, and a collaborative culture, creating the conditions for teachers to experiment with non traditional instructional approaches. Furthermore, the respondents pointed to the importance of instructional leadership, an innovation oriented school culture that encouraged experimentation, and professional development, while noting that accessible literature and concrete guidance on designing PLEs for struggling students remain limited, making this a particular challenge. Overall, this study serves as a proof of concept for cross curricular teaching as a viable educational approach in remedial education, addressing the needs of struggling learners. At the same time, it highlights that successful implementation requires specific social organizational working conditions within teacher teams.

Arnou, C., Van Peteghem, H., Engels, N., Placklé, I., & Vandecandelaere, M. (2025). Towards a Framework for Powerful Learning Environments for Struggling Students in Middle School: A Systematic Review. RMLE Online, 48(10), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/19404476.2025.2581562 Franck, E., & Nicaise, I. (2019). De invloed van school- en systeemkenmerken op (on)gelijke onderwijsuitkomsten naar sociale herkomst en thuistaal: Vergelijkende analyse op PISA 2015. HIVA / Hamburg: IEA/ Gent: Steunpunt Onderwijsonderzoek. Lavrijsen, J., & Nicaise, I. (2016). Educational tracking, inequality and performance: New evidence from a differences-in-differences technique. Res. Comp. Int. Educ., 11(3), 334–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745499916664818 OECD. (2023). PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The State of Learning and Equity in Education. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/53f23881-en Rakesh, D., Lee, P. A., Gaikwad, A., & McLaughlin, K. A. (2025). Annual Research Review: Associations of socioeconomic status with cognitive function, language ability, and academic achievement in youth: a systematic review of mechanisms and protective factors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 66(4), 417–439. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.14082 Van Peteghem, H., Arnou, C., Wils, M., Verachtert, P., Surma, T., Vandecandelaere, M., & Placklé, I. (2024). Krachtige leeromgevingen in de B-stroom. Deelstudie3: Observatieonderzoek naar krachtige leeromgevingen in de B-stroom (Unpublished Manuscript No. 3). Vlaamse Overheid.