Approaches to strengthening teachers' interdisciplinary expertise: From configurative review to design patterns

Abstract Teachers often work across disciplinary boundaries—sometimes without noticing it, sometimes in a conscious, deliberate way. Learning to work with different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing, and to work fluently within and across curriculum areas, is rarely straightforward. Not much is known about helping teachers learn to tackle interdisciplinary challenges. This paper reports the outcomes of a multi‐phase configurative review of the literature on pre‐service and in‐service teacher interdisciplinary education; that is, on approaches to helping new and practising teachers become more capable of working in interdisciplinary ways. The review is configurative (interpretive, theory‐building) rather than aggregative (theory‐testing). Findings from our detailed review of 51 papers are synthesised and organised in a novel way—identifying a set of related design patterns that are aligned with the demands of course and curriculum design. The paper's contribution is at two levels. Outcomes from the review provide new practical and conceptual knowledge about approaches to strengthening teachers' interdisciplinary expertise. Our methodology for synthesising design insights from the review is also novel. It should be of interest to scholars conducting reviews of educational research that are intended to create actionable knowledge for course, curriculum and/or assessment design. Context and implications Rationale for this study: Few school teachers have the interdisciplinary expertise required for twenty‐first‐century education. An integrative understanding of how to support the development of such expertise is needed. Why the new findings matter: This review synthesises findings from the literature on developing teachers' interdisciplinary expertise and formulates them in terms of reusable design ideas. Implications for practitioners, policy makers and researchers: The paper should be of interest to teacher educators who are involved in pre‐service or in‐service teacher education. The outcomes of the review are presented in a form that can guide course and curriculum design work being undertaken by teams of teacher educators. The approach taken in the review may also be of interest to other researchers who wish to synthesise insights from reviews of the literature in a way that can readily inform educational design.