Abstract:

Much has been said and written about interdisciplinary projects, the analyses of which have institutional, scientific and pedagogical aspects. In Brazil the National Curricular Parameters (PCN) and the National Guidelines for Training of high school teachers charge high school teachers to develop interdisciplinary projects capable of transforming individual actions in collective actions in schools and to introduce a new school environment. Meanwhile, many teachers seem to find difficult to sustain, for a long time, an education with these characteristics and, in fact, little has been done so that they can develop the necessary skills. For the teaching of science, the ties imposed by the knowledge to be taught seem to introduce more difficulties for the elaboration of proposals in this direction; the students, although like the focus, seem to find difficult to master the scientific content without a disciplinary perspective.
We will use Kaës' references on groups and institutions to analyze group phenomena in cases of interdisciplinary projects in Science Education. The elements of Kaës’s model used here are termed unconscious psychic organizers, which consist of the phases that an institutionalized group undergoes as it evolves, and the intermediaries which operate at moments of crisis in the group as it reconciles conflictual situations. Kaës’ thinking will help us analyze the difficulties that teachers and trainers of teachers face when they set out to introduce curricular changes in educational practices. We will apply Kaës model and compare the main characteristics of two experiences, which lasted three years: i) a collective construction of the planning and accomplishment of curricular changes via interdisciplinary projects, conducted by an university teacher in a Basic School, ii) the construction process of a collective and interdisciplinary work developed in a partnership between a High School and other institutions of education and research.
We will show the different phases of the experiences: the original moment, i.e. the initial organization of the group carried out by the founder, the ideological moment with the emergence of the members’ demands and the presence of new tasks and commitments for the group and the final moment, when differentiation between individual subjects and the group is sustained and the group absorbs each member’s contributions.
The analysis will show the relevance of some elements for the success of the experiences: the leadership of some member of the group in proposing intermediaries for solving the impasses, the equilibrium between disciplinary competence and interdisciplinary activities, and the institutional support to keep interdisciplinary activities functioning for a long time.
We believe that the promotion of curricular changes from an interdisciplinary perspective is a complex challenge in all instances, suggesting that the stability of results can only be guaranteed by an articulation between the processes of ongoing training, school organization and institutional support of the Secretariats of Education.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinarity, Science Education, Institution development.