Bioethics Project – Educating to Be: reflecting on the challenges of an interdisciplinary pedagogical practice

Abstract

This article aims to present the theoretical assumptions and general lines of an interdisciplinary project that is articulated around the disciplinary area of bioethics and that has been implemented in the first years of secondary education at Colégio Marista de Carcavelos (Cascais, Portugal). The work aims to make a critical assessment of this pedagogical tool, exploring its potential as a practice that promotes an active pedagogy and raises students' awareness of the learning of complexity, while simultaneously seeking to analyze the limitations of this type of methodology which, given its interdisciplinary nature, presupposes practices that involve a deep degree of disciplinary deconfinement that contradicts the very logic of teacher training and practice. Based on experience accumulated over more than a decade, the authors will analyze the theoretical assumptions of the project and, using two different scales, will show how the theoretical intentions were fulfilled in everyday school life: firstly, and through a brief archeology of the project, the reason for it at the institutional level will be analyzed; secondly, will be analyzed the daily pedagogical experience, listening, for this, students and teachers who were, after all, its protagonists.