QUALIFYING MATHEMATICS TEACHERS TO DESIGN INTERDISCIPLINARY LEARNING ACTIVITIES OF MATHEMATICS AND MUSIC

"Interdisciplinary learning of mathematics and arts is often acknowledged as supporting the development of students' problem-solving skills, encouraging student involvement in learning, and fostering students' creativity. However, for teachers to acknowledge the benefits of interdisciplinary learning of mathematics and arts, and express willingness to apply it in their classrooms, they must first experience such learning for themselves. To that end, they have to take part in dedicated training courses. The study described in this paper followed the experience of twenty-seven elementary school mathematics teachers who participated in an annual professional development program that took place once every two weeks and was designed to qualify them to implement an interdisciplinary approach to teaching mathematics and arts. The course included four interdisciplinary modules: math-music, math-painting, math-photography, and math-dance. None of the teachers had prior knowledge of interdisciplinary teaching and learning. The mathematical topic chosen was fractions, as this topic entails numerous difficulties of various kinds both for the teachers and the students. In what follows we focus on the teachers' experience with module no. 1, math-music. Before we explicitly exposed the teachers to the rationale of interdisciplinary learning of mathematics and music, they were asked to design learning activities that integrate fractions and music. No specific instructions were given, as we aimed at allowing the teachers to examine their initial perceptions and interpretations regarding interdisciplinarity, and then adapting the contents of the professional development program to the teachers' early perceptions and knowledge. After completing the design of the activities, the teachers presented them, explained their considerations, and provided mutual feedback. They also rated the extent to which interdisciplinarity was expressed in the activity, according to criteria they had developed themselves. The study indicated that teachers who knew how to play a certain musical instrument and read notes produced more mathematically significant content. Moreover, activities based on considerations relating only to common student mistakes in performing arithmetic operations in fractions did not lead to the design of activities characterized as having a high extent of interdisciplinarity. In case the considerations included general mathematical knowledge and knowledge of the mathematics curriculum, the extent of integration increased. Following these findings, the professional development program focused on deepening the teachers' mathematical knowledge and musical knowledge relevant to the subject of fractions. This approach has proven to be effective in terms of teachers' ability to produce meaningful interdisciplinary math-music activities, thus indicating the feasibility of teacher training for implementing an interdisciplinary approach."