Life's Learning Path Towards Cross-disciplinary Competencies : An Assessment

Abstract

At the moment, the changes affecting school and education are topics of discussion more than ever before. The new core curriculum for basic education (2014) and digitalization of learning tools serve as major ignitors of discussion: nowadays information and communication technology reach the teacher and the pupil elsewhere, not just in the ICT class of the school - it moves wirelessly everywhere, backpacks and pockets too. The change in school and in education is not only the new introduction of premises, places or tools but also above all the updating of the teachers' professionality to correspond with today's ideas of good learning and of realizing the curriculum as a part of the pupil's life. It means the awareness and skills of what today's teaching and learning contain, what kind of learning theory directs operation and how the teacher's own professionality meets these changes.

In this article we examine the pupil's assessment as a part of the multi-disciplinary learning process from the points of view of transformational pedagogy (transformational pedagogic, QED) and the core curriculum (2014). The objective is to identify ways which are based on these and methods to develop teaching and learning so that every learner has equal chances to learn, grow and to develop in the environments which support learning whilst developing their cross-disciplinary skills. The article presents and explains one multidisciplinary learning module, Dive into culture through games -learning project, which is based on the learning theory of the new core curriculum 2014. The model of contextual pedagogical approach for learning and the examination of the different dimensions of the teachers' knowledge and skills of the 2000s (Piispanen & Meriläinen 2013) form a theoretical frame of reference for the learning project.

The results show that the planning and implementation of teaching, which is based on the contextual pedagogical model of teaching and learning, supports the individual learning of the pupil in the National Curriculum 2014 (OPS 2014) frame of reference in the context of the basic education.