Browsing by Author "Brunberg, Alex"

The purpose of this thesis is to find out the experiences of lower secondary school teachers on how interdisciplinary teaching at the elementary school level affects students' work skills at the lower secondary school level. The background for the thesis is an elementary school in eastern Uusimaa, which has transformed its entire school day into interdisciplinary teaching and thus almost completely abolished subject divisions. With a few exceptions, all pupils from the elementary school in question go on to the same secondary school. Previous studies on interdisciplinary teaching have shown that interdisciplinary teaching promotes, among other things, students' problem-solving skills, collaboration skills and the ability to see the big picture and combine information and knowledge from different school subjects and scientific areas. This thesis analyzes whether secondary school teachers feel that these work skills are distinguished in secondary school students. In this thesis, qualitative interviews with a phenomenological approach have been used. Four informants were chosen for the interviews, all subject teachers from the same lower secondary school. The interviews were conducted via Microsoft Teams. The interviews were recorded and transcribed, after which the transcripts have been analyzed thematically. The central themes that emerged from the interviews were the informants' perceptions of how interdisciplinary teaching relates to students' work skills, the informants' views on interdisciplinary teaching and what interdisciplinary teaching looks like in lower secondary schools today. These themes were analyzed and presented separately in the results chapter. Three out of four informants felt that they did not notice differences in the working skills of pupils who worked interdisciplinary in elementary school and pupils who worked traditionally with separeted subjects in elementary school. All informants felt that there are mostly positive aspects of interdisciplinary teaching at the theory level, but that this approach is not used at the lower secondary level. Therefore, the informants felt that the work skills that pupils may have learned with the help of interdisciplinary teaching in elemantary school do not emerge in lower secondary school. Thus, the conclusions of the research are that lower secondary school teachers mostly feel that there are no differences in pupils' working skills regardless of the working methods they used in elementary school.