The incorporation of interdisciplinary education into teacher education standards involves more than the formal inclusion of a pedagogical principle: it entails a set of epistemic and cultural decisions through which specific understandings of knowledge integration and professional preparation are normatively stabilised. Interdisciplinary education is increasingly positioned as a key orientation for preparing teachers to address complex educational problems that exceed disciplinary boundaries, raising questions about how such integration becomes legitimate within formal frameworks of teacher education. This paper examines how interdisciplinary education is constructed through teacher education standards and the tensions that arise from this normative configuration.

Teacher education standards play a constitutive role in defining what counts as legitimate knowledge, professional practice, and academic organisation within initial teacher education (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; Ingvarson et al., 2006). They function as regulatory instruments that operate through normative stabilisation, shaping expectations about what future teachers should know, be able to do, and how their preparation should be organised under regimes of standardisation and accountability (Falabella, 2014, 2021; Bellei & Muñoz, 2023). When interdisciplinary education is articulated within such standards, its meaning is shaped through expert-driven deliberations that delimit its scope, relevance, and relationship to disciplinary traditions.

This study examines the Chilean case, where standards have become a central regulatory mechanism for secondary initial teacher education following the establishment of the Teacher Professional Development System (Chile, 2016). In this context, the Ministry of Education convened academic teams from universities to elaborate pedagogical and disciplinary standards through expert-led processes approved by the National Education Council. These standards function as official reference points for programme accreditation and national diagnostic assessment, reinforcing their constitutive influence on the alignment between initial teacher education, the school curriculum, and expectations of professional performance (Voisin & Fernández, 2025).

Conceptually, the analysis draws on the notion of policy objects (Sin, 2014) to approach interdisciplinary education not as a stable pedagogical innovation imported into teacher education, but as an object that is constructed, delimited, and rendered governable through normative work. From this perspective, standards-making constitutes a site where expert deliberations establish what interdisciplinary education is taken to mean, what forms of knowledge integration are considered legitimate, and which professional expectations are attached to future secondary teachers.

While existing research has identified the institutional domain as a key yet underexplored site for understanding interdisciplinary education, there has been limited analytical specification of how this domain can be examined when the empirical focus is on standards. Process-oriented approaches to institutionalising interdisciplinarity (Vienni-Baptista, 2024) enable this examination by foregrounding epistemic and cultural dimensions through which interdisciplinary education is normatively configured within institutional settings.

This study asks how interdisciplinary education is defined and prescribed within the official regulatory field of initial teacher education, which epistemic, pedagogical, and organisational assumptions underpin this prescription, and what tensions, ambivalences, and expectations emerge regarding its incorporation into teacher education programmes. Methodologically, this study is based on qualitative document analysis of a corpus of national teacher education standards and related regulatory texts, analysed through reflexive thematic analysis focusing on definitional statements and internal normative tensions. The findings indicate that interdisciplinary education is selectively and unevenly stabilised within teacher education standards, with disciplinary hierarchies and instrumental framings structuring differentiated expectations regarding integration, collaboration, and professional responsibility. By analysing standards as sites of normative decision-making, the paper contributes to teacher education research by clarifying how interdisciplinary education is institutionally configured through academic and organisational distinctions rather than through coherent pedagogical prescriptions.

This study adopts a qualitative, interpretive research design centred on the analysis of normative texts governing initial teacher education. The empirical focus is on Chilean teacher education standards for secondary education, understood as institutional artefacts that stabilise expectations regarding legitimate knowledge, professional practice, and academic organisation. Given the interest in examining how interdisciplinary education is defined and prescribed within the official regulatory field, the study relies on qualitative document analysis combined with reflexive thematic analysis. The empirical corpus comprises national policy and regulatory documents directly related to the definition and regulation of initial teacher education standards for secondary education. These include the Standards for the Teaching Profession intended for pedagogy programs and for practicing teachers, the curricular bases, and complementary technical documents produced during their formulation and validation, based on their formal regulatory status, relevance to the field, and explicit or implicit references to interdisciplinary education, knowledge integration, or cross-disciplinary expectations. Taken together, the corpus represents the authoritative normative framework through which interdisciplinary education is officially articulated for teacher preparation. The analysis was conducted using reflexive thematic analysis, following the approach developed by Braun and Clarke (2006, 2019, 2021). This analytic approach was selected because it conceptualises themes as analytic constructions generated through the researcher’s active, theoretically informed engagement with the data, rather than as categories that simply emerge. Reflexive thematic analysis is particularly well suited to the study of normative and policy texts, as it allows attention to both explicit formulations and epistemic and cultural assumptions embedded in policy language. Analytic work proceeded through iterative and recursive phases of familiarisation with the corpus, initial coding, theme development and refinement, and analytic writing. Coding was primarily semantic but increasingly interpretive, focusing on how interdisciplinary education was defined, justified, delimited, and positioned in relation to disciplinary knowledge, professional expectations, and institutional organisation. Throughout the process, codes and themes were developed in dialogue with the study’s conceptual framework, particularly the notions of policy objects and epistemic and cultural dimensions. Analytical rigour was supported through sustained engagement with the corpus, systematic documentation of analytic decisions, and reflexive memo-writing that traced the development of themes and shifts in interpretation over time. This approach ensured coherence between the research questions, theoretical framing, and analytic claims, foregrounding meaning-making as a situated and theoretically informed process. As a result, the analysis provides a nuanced account of how interdisciplinary education is normatively configured within teacher education standards.

The analysis shows that interdisciplinary education is actively present within teacher education standards, but it is configured through differentiated and uneven normative prescriptions rather than through a unified pedagogical framework. Interdisciplinarity is consistently valued as a desirable orientation, yet its meaning is shaped by strong disciplinary classifications and instrumental framings that structure how integration is imagined, assigned, and limited across curricular areas. The standards analysed distribute expectations for interdisciplinary education asymmetrically. Certain disciplines are positioned as central drivers of integration, often linked to transversal competencies or pedagogical coordination, while others are framed as contributors to predefined learning outcomes without equivalent epistemic authority. This differentiated allocation of roles reinforces existing disciplinary hierarchies and constrains the development of more symmetrical or dialogical forms of knowledge integration in initial teacher education. At the same time, the prescriptive force of standards operates through academic and organisational distinctions rather than through detailed pedagogical guidance. Expectations regarding collaboration, curriculum alignment, and professional responsibility are normatively stabilised, while concrete orientations for designing, enacting, and evaluating interdisciplinary education remain ambiguous. As a result, interdisciplinary education appears simultaneously mandated, encouraged, and constrained within the regulatory framework. These findings underscore the importance of examining standards as institutional sites where epistemic and cultural decisions are made prior to programme-level enactment. The normative configuration identified here shapes the conditions under which interdisciplinary education becomes legitimate and actionable within teacher education programmes, demarcating both its possibilities and its limits. More broadly, this study highlights the need for teacher education research that attends the epistemic and cultural work performed by regulatory texts when interdisciplinary education is promoted as a response to complex educational challenges. Understanding how such orientations are normatively configured at the level of standards is essential for explaining why interdisciplinary education remains often unevenly realised within initial teacher education.

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