This study investigates how teacher educators who work with decentralized competence development understand interdisciplinarity in schools. The inclusion of three interdisciplinary themes in the Norwegian curriculum has brought interdisciplinarity back on the agenda both in schools and in teacher education, and in in a variety of approaches to institutional collaboration. The research is based on the fact that interdisciplinarity as a concept and phenomenon is multifaceted, which the analysis of qualitative interviews with eight teacher educators helps to substantiate. In various ways, the informants of the study link interdisciplinarity to the categories collaboration, curriculum understanding, interdisciplinary themes and didactics. These categories point to aspects of the phenomena that are not necessarily linked to the degree of interaction between school subjects, but to how teachers work to develop an understanding of the national curriculum and put this into practice. The study argues for a closer look at a form of interdisciplinary didactics as an entry point to further development of theoretical and practical approaches to interdisciplinarity.
Read full abstract