Contextual Pedagogy: Teachers' journey beyond interdisciplinarity

The paper describes a collaborative reflective inquiry of teachers and researchers that was aimed at bridging the gap between the school-internal and school external cultures. It suggests that the inquiry into current social problems has the potential to bridge between the social-political zeitgeist and the schools, through the exposure of possible different conceptions of knowledge and different approaches to the nature of learning. The paper addresses some milestones along this process that led to the development of a formal model of contextual pedagogy. This pedagogy claims that content, didactics and world views, are all molded into the learning situation and concurrently emerge from it. The unique nature of this pedagogy is described by the different understanding of concepts that are associated with the process of learning and knowledge construction such as: initiation (locus of control), orientation of the process, sources of legitimate knowledge, scope and boundaries of the inquiry issues, responsibility as well as ambiguity and uncertainty, as intrinsic to the process and the nature of the emerging knowledge.