We discuss how an ethnographic approach allowed us to describe and analyze cases of interdisciplinary educational practices that recently took shape in Belgian Flemish secondary schools after an educational reform.

Since 2019, secondary education in Flanders is being gradually reformed (Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, 2023). In particular, this reform stimulates interdisciplinarity in a diversity of forms and gives individual schools a lot of freedom in how to organize the concrete realization of the curriculum in a specific school. While mandatory learning goals before the reform where listed under well-defined school subjects that had to be implemented as such, legal learning requirements are now listed as groups of competencies not anymore associated to the obligation to organize learning based on specific school subjects. As a result, Flemish schools today can choose to work with traditional school subjects, interdisciplinary clusters, projects, seminars or other organizations of learning. In this context, in the last years a multitude of school-based, interdisciplinary practices with an experimental character arose in Flemish secondary schools.

While seminal papers in the literature classified at theoretical level the many ways in which interdisciplinary curricula can be constructed and organized combining elements from different subjects (Fogarty, 1991) and how this shapes instruction (Lederman & Niess, 1997) (Nikitina, 2006), the recent changes in the Flemish secondary school system suggest a different perspective: to consider interdisciplinarities as complex and diverse educational practices, to be studied as such by suitable research approaches and methods.

Engaging in ethnography in educational contexts, considered to be interdisciplinary by local school actors, allowed us to experience, describe and analyze interdisciplinarities as practices in today’s modernized secondary schools.

Ethnographic approaches in interdisciplinary educational contexts have been previously used for instance to gather information on perspectives of teachers on interdisciplinarity, within a framework where the implementation of well-defined interdisciplinary instruction was the underlying background (McBee, 1996). In our study, we took the perspective of studying interdisciplinarities as diverse and rich situated practices arising in schools, with the goal of achieving a case-based rich description of these educational practices.

An ethnographic approach had been previously taken for the study of educational practices with a specific focus on the materiality of education (Roehl, 2012), highlighting the contribution of things to classroom practices seen as complex, interwoven assemblages.

In a Flemish research project we selected cases recently arose in the context of the educational reform, being referred to as ‘interdisciplinary’ by local school actors (teachers, coordinators, school management). We dove in these practices as educational ethnographers with the purpose of achieving a rich, complex description of interdisciplinarities appearing in Flemish ‘modernized’ secondary education.

We considered the following research questions:

-       How can interdisciplinarities in modernized secondary schools be described as practices by an ethnographic study of cases considered to be ‘interdisciplinary’ by local actors?

-       What common aspects or elements arise (if present at all) from the analysis of the ethnographic descriptions of the studied practices, that can be associated with their being ‘interdisciplinary’?

While our research has been focusing on interdisciplinarity as stimulated in Flemish secondary schools by a local reform, a similar trend is present in other European countries (see for instance the case of Finland (FNBE, 2016)), and has been driven by European policy (EC - European Political Strategy Centre, 2017). For this reason, our approach and results can be relevant for educational researchers in other European countries.

Relying on our network of contacts (as educational researchers and teacher educators) in the regional context of Flemish Limburg, we selected cases of educational practices in secondary schools that were considered to be ‘interdisciplinary’ by local contacts in the schools (management, coordination or teachers) and that, according to them, arose or were consistently changed as a consequence of the Flemish reform (‘modernization’) of secondary education. In every school an individual researcher engaged in ethnography in the selected practice(s). The considered cases were studied by: - Observation of lessons and laboratories (in the school and, in one case, also in a nearby chemical factory), together with informal interviews during contact moments with teachers and students (during lessons, breaks, in the teacher room). Observations and informal interviews have been documented by field notes with text and sketches, together with photographs and collected artefacts. - Document study: focus on documents specific for the considered cases and observations, for instance the official descriptions of the study direction or curriculum in the context of which observations took place. These documents were all related to the Flemish secondary school reform. The study of these documents was necessary for the ethnographer in order to ‘enter’ the world of the teachers. In fact, these documents were used by the teacher teams on a daily basis, for instance when preparing the lessons. Meetings with local school actors also took place to ask questions or verify relations between the observed practices and findings in documents. - Digital editing of photographs: by applying several types of filters we highlighted contrast, patterns and structures in the pictures taken during the observations. This procedure allowed us to look at the images in different ways and to see something different, which in turn brought us back to our field notes, allowing us to discover new elements and perspectives in them. The final qualitative data set for the different cases, including field notes, artefacts, edited pictures and commented extracts from the studied documents, was analyzed as a whole by the researchers together, in search for contrasts and features that could be considered ‘common’ in some way but were realized differently in different practices. Due to the relatively short ‘immersion’ time for the considered cases, our method can be described as short term theoretically informed ethnography (Pink & Morgan, 2013).

We will reflect and elaborate on how ethnography allowed us to do practice-oriented research on interdisciplinarity from a perspective where educational practices take center stage (Tamassia, Ardui & Frenssen, 2023). We will present fragments of our qualitative data set, in particular extracts of the field notes and photographs. Based on them, we will discuss for concrete examples how the interplay between the different elements in our data – text, edited photographs, artefacts and extracts from documents – revealed aspects of the interdisciplinarities emerging from the ethnographies. We will elaborate on ‘common’ aspects arising in different ways in some of the studied cases. These different ‘emerging interdisciplinarities’ relate in particular to: (a) the reorganization and re-invention of (the use of) educational spaces, and the movement of people and things through these spaces; (b) ‘ways of doing and thinking’ of professionals in a field linked to future job prospects for students, appearing to play the role of an ‘interdisciplinary glue’; (c) the realization of concrete products associated to forms of innovation. By revealing interactions and attitudes of teachers in interdisciplinary practices, the ethnographies also raised some questions: (d) Can ‘hidden’ interdisciplinarities, visible for teachers but not for students, arise in the collaboration of interdisciplinary teacher teams? (e) Can the enthusiasm of teacher teams for the idea ‘interdisciplinarity’ lead to practices where ‘interdisciplinary’ is attached to a practice as a label? The ethnographies also showed how interdisciplinary practices arise, take shape and evolve within contours locally negotiated in the school, in a space spanned between curriculum requirements, own tradition and vision of the school, interventions of external advisors, skills and interests of currently present teachers and students, and more. This way, the ethnographies made the situated, dynamic, interwoven and complex nature of interdisciplinary practices, involving many human and nonhuman actors, visible.

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