Towards an Integrated Approach to Teaching: Experimenting with Interdisciplinarity in Teacher Education

This paper describes an experience of codesign and interdisciplinary teaching addressed to future preschool and primary school teachers, carried out within the Didattica e Didattiche Laboratory at the University of Macerata. The laboratory, codesigned and conducted by professors of subjectspecific didactics and general didactics, was grounded in Italo Calvino’s notion of “lightness” which served as a shared inspirational theme capable of connecting different forms of knowledge, languages, and methods. The initiative consisted of four workshopbased sessions, including interdisciplinary design activities, supported by moments of theoretical and metacognitive reflection. The analysis of the produced materials (questionnaires and teaching designs) revealed that exposure to various practices and epistemological frameworks fostered participants’ critical awareness of interdisciplinarity’s educational potential. Some teaching designs demonstrated an ability to integrate disciplinary methods and content in relation to an authentic problem, emphasising consideration of the broader significance of the activity and the role of representations in learning processes. Finally, the collaboration among professors from different fields and the interaction with students proved to be a transformative experience in itself, establishing a shared space for the construction of knowledge and negotiation of common practices and languages. Overall, the experience confirms the relevance of interdisciplinarity in initial teacher training as a key tool for addressing the complexity of knowledge and educational reality.