Interdisciplinarity for Learning and Teaching Mathematics

Abstract

Complex problems need interdisciplinary approaches. Thinking in an interdisciplinary way asks for changes in learning and teaching and hence in our views on pedagogical problems. An interdisciplinary approach could provide a new framework also for dealing with disciplinary didactical problems. In this paper, we propose a methodology which we call globally interdisciplinary laboratories as an effective way to practice interdisciplinary teaching at the high school level. We discuss the possibility of applying this methodology to the learning and teaching of mathematics. Globally interdisciplinary laboratories are designed by a pool of researchers in collaboration with high school teachers of several disciplines and they are delivered in the classroom by a pool of teachers in co-presence. This has been experimented in Italy in many classes which are part of a national educational project called Liceo matematico. In this paper, we discuss the general design principle of a GIL and exemplify the methodology by considering the one we have called educate the sight, which aims at stimulating, within an interdisciplinary framework, intellectual curiosity, the ability to spot the prominent features of a problem and, in mathematics, the ability of conjecturing, which should be one of the fundamental concerns of mathematical teaching, according to Polya's decalogue for mathematics teachers (POLYA, 1981).

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“…Los cuales son capaces de resolver operaciones básicas fundamentales, pero a la hora de aplicarlas para la solución de una operación no saben cómo hacerla ya que aprendieron de una forma mecánica y repetitiva (Instituto Nacional de Evaluación Educativa, INEVAL, 2018). En consecuencia, se considera a las matemáticas como una de las materias más importantes y útiles en las escuelas, lugares de trabajo, empresas e incluso para la toma de decisiones sustanciales en la vida diaria (Awantagusnik, 2021) (Zamnah, 2021); aprenderlas y enseñarlas es una tarea bastante compleja, pero significativa para la sociedad (Rogora, 2021). En ese sentido la resolución de problemas es el centro potencial de las matemáticas, su capacidad de desarrollar el pensamiento y el razonamiento analítico en los seres humanos.…”

Analyzing cosmic-ray muons in the experimental paths of the “Mathematical High School” Project

“…The activities take place in more than 160 institutes of the whole national territory. The aim of the project is to provide students with interdisciplinary laboratory activities that build bridges between scientific and humanistic cultures having mathematics as the universal language of knowledge and as the substrate of all the paths that are proposed [1]. The activities are developed by professors and researchers of universities and research centers in collaboration and are proposed in extracurricular times in collaboration with the schools' teachers.…”