Interdisciplinary in educational legislation, in academic discourse and in high school practice: panacea or educational fallacy?

Abstract

The discourse about interdisciplinarity in Brazil has been widely incorporated in the educational legislation since the 70s, and it has been considered as a tool to bring education to higher quality levels. In the same direction, currently there is a significant growth in researches pointing to the importance of interdisciplinarity. On the other hand, both official documents and the academia consider the teacher as the responsible to develop and implement interdisciplinary in the classroom. What is observed in studies that investigate the practice of teachers is that teachers undertake projects they conceive as interdisciplinary, but most of them are only multidisciplinary, supported by the common sense. This framework puts the interdisciplinarity discourse as an educational fallacy. This paper discusses the historical insistence of legislation and academia to elevate this discourse as a large object of the educational desire. In relation to the teachers, this work searches the reasons why they do not deepen this practice, with a theoretical analysis supported by the epistemology of practice teaching as thought by Tardif and Lessard, which justify teachers’ actions based on intrinsic characteristics of the situations of interactive work.