- Local and global challenges, such as addressing climate change, food, water and energy security, health, or governing culturally plural societies, are increasingly complex and require interdisciplinarity.
- Multidisciplinarity is critical to bridging across silos in order to understand the causes and complexities of modern-day challenges and develop innovative solutions.
- It is at the intersection of different disciplines that novel insights emerge. Yet, in their overwhelming majority, Europe’s schools and universities remain organised in silo departments that do not sufficiently address the interconnectedness of today’s world.
Technology can contribute to new ways of learning. It can be taught not only as a subject but rather used to convey the material learned in other subjects. For instance, learning about World War II becomes not just a study of history but an all-encompassing analysis of the sociological and economic angles, using technology to bring the subjects learned to life.
The future is already here
Phenomenon-based and interdisciplinary teaching: the case of Finland
For the past 40 years, Finland has been one of the highest-performing school systems in the world, consistently ranking among the top scorers in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests and compares the global performance of 15-year-olds in reading, maths and science literacy. PISA does not assess what students know; it focuses on how students apply theory and thinking in answering questions — so how they solve problems and apply what they know.
Holding this leading position for so long, however, has not made Finland complacent. The country is faced with fast-paced technological, demographic and socioeconomic changes that have led to concerns about increasing inequality and growing regional disparities. In 2016, it launched a national programme aimed at improving primary and lower secondary education, further developing the phenomenon-based, interdisciplinary approach to teaching which the country has been experimenting with since the 1980s.
The new core curriculum for basic education focuses on transversal (generic) competences and works across school subjects; with collaborative classroom practices, where pupils may work with several teachers simultaneously — thereby also encouraging Finnish school teachers who have traditionally focused on a given topic to work together with their peers in school around multidisciplinary modules.
‘Finnish schools will continue to teach mathematics, history, arts, music and other subjects in the future. But with the new basic school reform, all children will also learn via periods looking at broader topics, such as the European Union, community and climate change, or 100 years of Finland’s independence, which would bring in multidisciplinary modules on languages, geography, sciences and economics,’ Pasi Sahlberg, Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Helsinki and Oulu, and leading figure in education policy, explains.
