Abstract
In this chapter, the authors present and assess, in the context of initial teacher education, the process and results of the implementation of an interdisciplinary didactic sequence on environmental and mathematics education, developed to promote preservice teachers research-based interdisciplinarity. The data were gathered, using participant observation and the reports produced by the preservice teachers' groups. The collected data were treated using content analysis techniques. The results of the participant observation and the analysis of the preservice teachers report validated the research-based interdisciplinary didactic sequence on environmental and mathematics education. The critical and research-based activities, reflection, and assessment, developed by preservice teachers, allowed the production of knowledge to improve practices in higher and basic education contexts.
TopIntroduction
Collaboration, communication, reasoning, critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity and innovation are internationally recognized competencies that should be developed by students to face the complex challenges of a world changing in an accelerated way (Biseth et al., 2022; Ng, 2019; World Economic Forum, 2016). Those competencies are also included in the Portuguese referential Students’ Profile by the End of Compulsory Schooling (Martins et al., 2017). The referred challenges of our changing world include climate change, the recent COVID-19 pandemic, technological innovation, and ubiquity, as well as the threatening of fake news to a democratic and literate world.
To develop the abovementioned 21st century competences, and to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2022), there is a need for the integration of interdisciplinarity in the curriculum, making it possible the development of students’ interdisciplinary thinking in solving real complex problems (Drake & Reid, 2020; Ng, 2019).
Accordingly, the importance of interdisciplinarity in preservice Teacher Education, namely between natural sciences and mathematics, is internationally acknowledged (Geiger et al., 2018; An, 2017). In this context, the need for interdisciplinary activities in preservice Teacher Education is twofold, in what concerns (Geiger et al., 2018): i) supporting preservice teachers in experiencing and evaluating authentic learning activities that cross diverse subject areas; and ii) developing preservice teachers’ interdisciplinary pedagogical content knowledge.
The relevance of interdisciplinarity in preservice Teacher Education in Portugal is also supported by the Portuguese curriculum for basic education, which emphasizes essential knowledge and structuring skills for citizenship and sustainable development, with a focus on local and real-life contexts (OECD, 2018).
To develop students’ competences for the 21st century, preservice teachers must have themselves competences for critical reflection, innovation, continuous learning, and change (Aspfors & Eklund, 2017). To support and mediate the development of those competences, Teacher Education should be research-based, integrating research-based knowledge, research-related activities, and practically oriented requirements associated to the practical nature of teacher´s daily work (Aspfors & Eklund, 2017).
In this chapter, the authors present and assess the investigative process and results of the implementation of a didactic sequence on environmental and mathematics education, in the context of Initial Teacher Education in Portugal. The following research questions guided the investigative process: i) How do the preservice teachers, throughout the didactic sequence, design, implement and assess authentic interdisciplinary learning activities for children? ii) What shared concepts are included by the preservice teachers in the authentic learning activities for children, to bring disciplinary subjects together? and iii) How does the didactic sequence contribute to a research-based education of preservice teachers?
Key Terms in this Chapter
Spatial Location: The ability to identify and describe where an object is physically located with the help of a space coordinate system.
Authentic Learning: A constructivist approach, in which students construct their own knowledge, based on their previous representations and experiences, while developing new and complex inquiry and real-world problem-solving activities, using multiple resources, such as digital technologies.
Sustainable Development Goals: Set of 17 goals, subdivided into 169 targets, from the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda (“Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”), which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 by the 193 Member States of the United Nations. Those goals and targets aims to stimulate actions to build a more sustainable world by 2030.
Exotic Specie: Specie introduced, through human activity, into an area where it does not occur naturally.
Multisensory: Integration of sensations and information from different sensory modalities, such as visual, auditory, gustatory olfactory, as well as vestibular and somatic senses.
Proportion: A comparative relationship between quantities.
Spatial Orientation: The ability of an individual to determine his/her position or relative motion in relation to the surrounding environment.
Environmental Education: An interdisciplinary process aiming at developing experiences, awareness, knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, practices, motivations, and critical participation in and for the environment, promoting, in this way, environmental literacy and citizenship.
Quantity: The amount of something that can be measured.
Symmetry: A geometric transformation that preserves the distances and simultaneously leaves the figure globally invariant.
Education for Sustainable Development: An interdisciplinary process aiming at developing critical citizenship to achieve a social, economic, and environmental development, with social justice, and quality of life for present and future generations, without endangering ecological systems, services, and resources.
Cause-and-Effect: In Natural Sciences, it is a relationship between two events in which the second is a consequence of the first. Mathematically, it is a relationship between two variables in which a change in one variable produces a change in the other variable.
Native Specie: Specie that have become part of a particular region, ecosystem, or habitat through natural processes, without human intervention.