Abstract:

Top teachers are the ones who constantly question their practice, reflecting on their performance and assessing the effects of what and how they teach. Seeing classrooms as laboratories will allow them to understand where knowledge comes from and how effective teaching methods are. Recent research has proved the importance of a student-centred education system, in which teachers watch and listen to the real interests of students, adopting transdisciplinary methodologies in their classrooms, and seeing the use of technology as a very valuable teaching resource.

This paper aims at presenting an action research experiment which is currently being developed in a professional school in Portugal. A group of 28 students has been challenged to create five multimedia technical projects based on a novel written by Jose Saramago (“O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis”). By doing this, in order to accomplish one of the topics of the syllabus of Portuguese Literature, the 28 students of the third grade of a Professional Course of Multimedia Technician were divided into five groups, responsible each one for creating a 3D game, a documentary, a short film, a web page and an online walking route. This transdisciplinary project had as one of its prior objectives to understand if learning is more effective when students do what they really appreciate doing, namely when they apply their previous knowledge of technology, which is a popular area amongst adolescents, to a new problem: in this case, the analysis of a literary text. First results have shown a general approval of new methodologies based on the interests of the students, with them emphasising the fact of being possible, through project-based learning (PBL), to build meaningful learning. Through collaborative work, students have also had the opportunity of developing many of the skills and competences advocated by the most recent research, deepening their social and communicative skills, critical spirit, problem-solving abilities, aesthetic and abstract thought, among other competences.

In a truly student-based system, learners are challenged to build their own knowledge by having the possibility of pursuing their interests and preferences. By saying so, it is intended to stress the importance of project-based methodologies, particularly in what concerns to the use of technology in a transdisciplinary way. 21st century students deserve a 21st century school. The educational systems must be prepared to provide students with the possibility of using the knowledge they acquire out of the classroom to search and deepen their knowledge about a given topic in any discipline.

Keywords:

Action research, transdisciplinarity, project-based learning, collaborative environments, citizenship education, professional schools.