About
“Developing teachers’ interdisciplinary expertise” is a leveraging project, funded by the NSW Department of Education, 2021-2024. It aims to extend our collective understanding of interdisciplinary expertise, and how to enhance its development for pre- and in-service teachers and, through that, how to strengthen students’ capabilities for interdisciplinary work.
This project produced a scoping study and created an overarching framework that articulates the main constituents of teachers’ interdisciplinary expertise. It also co-created a set of practical reusable design resources for embedding the development of teachers’ interdisciplinary expertise in pre-service education and in-service professional development.
More about the project can be found here.
Outputs
The main outputs can be found on this page.
Contact us
If you would like further information about this project, please contact lina.markauskaite@sydney.edu.au
Project team
- Lina Markauskaite
- Peter Goodyear
- Cara Wrigley
- Teresa Swist
- Genevieve Mosely
Project reference group
A scoping study
This scoping study aimed to identify and map current practices and needs for developing pre- and in-service teachers’ interdisciplinary expertise in the Australian and, particularly, NSW school contexts. It included a review of the literature, the development of a consultation paper and follow-up consultation interviews with key partners and stakeholders structured around four questions:
- What are the most important areas of teachers’ interdisciplinary practices and needs for professional learning?
- What kind of expertise and resources do teachers need for productive interdisciplinary teaching?
- What are the key features of effective professional education for interdisciplinary teaching?
- What are the main barriers and enablers for developing pre- and in-service teachers’ expertise for interdisciplinary teaching?
The outcomes of this scoping study informed the development of an ecological framework for teachers’ interdisciplinary learning and design resources for teacher educators.
An ecological framework for teachers’ interdisciplinary learning
This document presents an ecological framework to support the development of teachers’ interdisciplinary expertise. It addresses the growing need for teachers to engage with the complex challenges of 21st-century teaching and work with knowledge from different fields. The framework is based on an ecological perspective that considers the complex interactions between teachers’ personal resourcefulness, their immediate environments, and the wider institutional and societal contexts. It acknowledges that teaching practices change—sometimes very rapidly—and there is no single pathway for developing teachers’ interdisciplinary expertise; new directions and possibilities can be opened by engaging with a range of theory, research, and practice insights when tailoring them to specific professional education needs and contexts. Therefore, the framework is constructed as a launchpad to help teacher educators and teachers understand and navigate the complex space of teachers’ interdisciplinary practices, expertise and learning.
Design principles for teacher educators
This practical resource book is created for teacher educators interested in integrating the development of interdisciplinary expertise into pre- and in-service teacher education. It introduces key ideas about interdisciplinary expertise and offers a set of design principles for designing teachers’ interdisciplinary learning. The book also outlines an activity to develop a model that articulates what the development of interdisciplinary expertise entails in a specific context, and five cases from pre- and in-service teacher educators and teachers describing how interdisciplinary professional learning was embedded in their teaching practices.