Interdisciplinary teaching as motivation: An initiative for change in post-16 vocational education

Abstract

A team of researchers in teacher education and teachers in secondary education vocational study programmes decide to plan and try out interdisciplinary teaching schemes combining the subject English with Media studies. This is a two-stage study. Firstly, the research team want to observe whether an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning will have positive effects on students’ motivation and thereby their engagement with learning activities. Questionnaires are applied in addition to the researchers’ participatory observations. Secondly, a longitudinal objective is to investigate whether the experience achieved, has led to any changes in the way teaching and learning activities are organized. Members of the teachers’ team are interviewed. Drawing on the concepts elaborated and restricted codes, and assuming that traditional teaching is disciplinary and tends to favour the academically inclined students, this article argues in favour of altering the code by opening up the conventional disciplinary setting of students’ learning. Thus, the main components of this article are a study of the students’ response to working across the disciplines; second, a discussion of whether the inferences made by the research team during and after the interdisciplinary project have caused any new practices in the facilitation of teaching and learning activities in this school five years later.