Knowledge in the classroom: teaching organization in an interdisciplinary perspective

This paper is a bibliographic research about interdisciplinarity and its organization in the curriculum. The concept of interdisciplinarity is discussed and a few epistemologic- methodological approaches are proposed to introduce the interdisciplinary practice in the school routine. As a conclusion, it is emphasized that interdisciplinarity should be taken as an instrument that may allow school to be an environment where critical and collective knowledge may be produced. To such end, curriculum should be redesigned and continuing teacher education practiced. It is needed, on one hand, to plan and operate knowledge vertically through the curriculum matrix, relating the idea of increasing complexity and deepening (vertical dimension), and in the other hand to relate the knowledge of one discipline to another (horizontal dimension). The idea of interdisciplinarity should delicately bring together the vertical and horizontal dimensions through curriculum and teacher practice, to allow the emergence of new knowledge with relational and contextual meaning.