Transdisciplinary Teaching and Learning: an Experiment

In our smart new world, characterized by continuous technological evolution, knowledge is subject to rapid obsolescence and change is the only constant. In this context, teachers are called upon to overcome the automatic habits of traditional knowledge transmission by developing a new perspective less tied to individual disciplines and more open to the many facets of reality. Only with a questioning and curious attitude aimed at innovation and pedagogical experimentation can teachers make their message meaningful again and help new generations to develop the habit of flexible and complex thinking in order to orient themselves in a fluid, globally connected and hypertechnological society. Following a course on multidisciplinarity, a group of secondary school teachers embarked on a journey of reading and experimenting in the classroom, realizing that through the transdisciplinary approach theorized by the quantum physicist Nicolescu, one can educate for the future. This powerful new approach suggests that teachers identify and tackle conceptual issues to work on and then they overcome the narrow limits of individual disciplines in order to understand complex events: this is the direction in which teachers and students of today's school should move, so that they will face tomorrow with greater awareness and effectiveness.