Interdisciplinary Teacher Education

50 years of Research

Abstract

The article discusses interdisciplinary teacher education and the contributions of the Graduate Program in Education: Curriculum at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), systematizing fifty years of research on the education of teacher-researchers from an interdisciplinary perspective and outlining theoretical and methodological contributions forged in action. Based on the author's prolonged observation of everyday teaching in basic and higher education, it is affirmed that the theory of interdisciplinarity is only legitimized in practice, requiring procedures that reconnect interrupted stories and restore the authorship, aesthetics, and ethics of teaching work. Four principles guide the methodology — waiting, humility, respect, and detachment — articulated with reference centers and the incorporation of Life Stories as a means of research-training (Pineau, 2002), action-research-training (Barbier, 1996), and work with metaphors and symbolic forms (like mandalas), which allow researchers to discover their “inner metaphor” and their “trademark.” The analytical movement combines linearity and circularity, alternating “inside-out” and “outside-in” perspectives to grasp contradictions, impasses (labyrinths), and transgressions as drivers of situated theoretical creation (Fazenda, 1994, 2021, 2023). By training teachers through an interdisciplinary approach, the research highlights effects that go beyond the specific study: the restoration of professional self-esteem, the spread of school culture, and the emergence of authorial collectives. It concludes by advocating procedures such as “sensitive listening” and epistemological rigor that embraces love as a force for elaboration, integrating praxis and reflection in the construction of educational knowledge.