Speaking and thinking about crosscurricular teaching: Terms, concepts, and conceptions

This chapter provides an overview of the most widely used terms and concepts in the field: multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity. These are problematized as being more related to disciplinary collaboration than school teaching. Instead, the terms crosscurricular and transcurricular are suggested as more explicitly related to school subjects and adopted as standards for this book. Different meanings of curricular are distinguished, and it is emphasized that our choice of terminology does not commit us to viewing teaching as regulated by a set of narrow goals or standardized sequence of instruction. The terms crosscurricular and transcurricular are used simply to describe - potentially otherwise very different - ways of teaching across and beyond the range of subjects composing a course of study at school. The chapter concludes with presenting a taxonomy of kinds of interaction between school subjects, applying it to the field of crosscurricular and transcurricular teaching.