Conference Agenda

The distinction between multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity was formulated by Jean Piaget (1972) and later taken up by Aldo Visalberghi (1973).

Despite the potential of these approaches to transcend the boundaries between paradigms and disciplinary labels, they still are not very widespread in university teaching practices, including those aimed at initial teacher training.

Starting from these assumptions, in the academic year 2024/25, the Laboratory 'Didattica e Didattiche' was conceived, aimed at students of the Master’s Degree in Primary Education at the University of Macerata. The Laboratory is configured as a heterotopic and heterochronic training device providing a complementary space with respect to school internship and curricular activities.

The Laboratory was born from the collaboration of professors from different disciplines (General Didactics, Italian Literature, Mathematics Education, Physics Education) who, choosing Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, and in particular Lightness, as integrating background, co-designed the didactic proposal synergistically.

During the co-presence meetings, the professors discussed intertwined examples stimulating connections between different disciplinary epistemologies and fostering debate.

Students were asked to design an interdisciplinary course for primary school or early childhood education, or to rethink the design they had already developed during their internship.

Thanks to the support of their peers and the teaching team, the pilot experience enabled the pre-service teachers to revise their naive ideas about the concept of interdisciplinarity and to gain a greater awareness of the educational value of crossing disciplinary boundaries at any school level.

Since the 2000s, European universities have adopted policies promoting the professionalisation of students and researchers. In France, this shift was marked by the "Freedom and Responsibilities of Universities" (LRU) law and initiatives like Pépites programs (2013), which foster student entrepreneurship and an entrepreneurial mindset in academia. These policies view student initiatives as drivers of innovation, professional skill development, and experimentation spaces. However, innovation is often framed through an individualistic lens, emphasizing private entrepreneurship and liberalized university models akin to private institutions.

Emerging alternatives challenge this perspective by adopting collective approaches aligned with local socio-economic needs. For instance, cooperative projects such as Coop’en 8 at the University of Paris 8 represent a novel model. This ephemeral student cooperative prioritizes collective entrepreneurial resources over individual ones, designing economic activities based on territorial social needs and students' skills. Coop’en 8 exemplifies cooperative entrepreneurship's potential to redefine traditional notions of innovation and foster economic citizenship.

This initiative raises critical questions about the role of cooperative entrepreneurship versus traditional models, particularly regarding social innovation and community impact. By exploring these dynamics, this presentation aims to highlight how cooperative approaches can reshape higher education's entrepreneurial landscape while addressing broader societal challenges.

Within the Inclusion Week promoted by the University of Macerata, three researchers from different disciplinary fields propose a workshop exploring how various teaching methodologies can merge to foster inclusive and engaging learning. Technology, mathematics education, and industrial engineering are integrated to create learning experiences based on conceptual materialization, which consists of concretizing essential ideas for one or more disciplines through artifacts that serve as educational mediators. The construction and use of such artifacts stimulate creativity and enhance mastery of concepts through multimodal and multisensory experiences. The interdisciplinary synergy, between pedagogical research, mathematics education and engineering design, opens up a fertile research space to explore how the mediation between the culture and the learners' previous knowledge influences teaching and learning processes.

The workshop on conceptual materialization, devoted to pre-service and in-service teachers of all educational levels, relies on the integration of narrative and logical thinking. It includes an active training experience structured into five phases:

a) independent reading of storytelling by the participants, aimed at highlighting the role of narration in shaping products and ideas;

b) interactive online lesson on the development of the conceptual materialization of an idea;

c) in-person workshop where each participant creates a conceptual materialization of an idea;

d) review and discussion session with trainers on the participants' creations;

e) final follow-up meeting to reflect on the experience.

During the presentation, the results of the workshop will be illustrated, and some interdisciplinary research directions for the future on the topic of artifacts as educational mediators will be outlined.

In this study, we propose a theoretical model to design and analyze interdisciplinary activities. We mean interdisciplinary learning as the capacity to merge knowledge and methods typical of different sources into a coherent unity and exploit the learned information to face new problems (Boix Mansilla, 2002). According to Boix Mansilla (2017), interdisciplinary learning involves four essential processes that can be connected to the following instructional principles: a) stimulating initial reflections on the “sense” of the problem faced; b) identifying the specific disciplinary aspects that intervene in the processes of understanding and solving the problem; c) supporting the synthesis to highlight how the perspectives offered by the disciplines support the solution process; d) stimulating critical thinking. Based on these principles, we introduced some guiding questions to be used as a theoretical and operational tool by teachers, to design interdisciplinary activities and analyze their implementation in the classroom.

We tested the use of this tool within a teacher education program aimed at promoting the creation of an inquiry community (Jaworksy, 2004) - the “Mathematics and Literature” group - where teachers of different disciplines (mainly Mathematics and Literature, but also Foreign Languages, Ancient Languages, and Philosophy) work together with two academic researchers to co-design interdisciplinary paths for secondary school students and a-posteriori reflect on their actual implementation.

In our talk, we will present the theoretical tool and discuss its application in teacher education programs by referring to a paradigmatic example from the experience developed in the “Mathematics and Literature” group.