Within the last 15 years, interdisciplinarity has (re-)emerged as a promising idea in the governing of education, urging a move beyond a focus on basic competencies in core subjects towards ways of organising teaching that transgress disciplines to foster the skills needed in what is described as an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world. While the idea of interdisciplinarity holds promise of meeting the challenges of todays’ complex societies, interdisciplinarity in practice, relies on concrete infrastructures of education, on routinized and often invisible techniques and materials that affect what interdisciplinarity does.
This paper examines interdisciplinarity through its infrastructures. It focuses on the effects of specific educational infrastructures for the practical ordering of interdisciplinarity. Examining the historical changes in the infrastructures of interdisciplinarity in the Danish upper-secondary school since 1960, the paper focuses on the transformations in the concrete techniques that have organised interdisciplinarity, pointing to their different justifications and their specific effects for interdisciplinary teaching. The paper shows that while interdisciplinarity in the Danish upper-secondary school was organised through a book on the history of ideas in the 1960, and through problem-oriented project work in the 1970s, Bloom’s taxonomy of learning became a pertinent infrastructure of Danish education and central to the practical organisation of interdisciplinarity in the mid 2000s. Showing these concrete changes in the infrastructures of interdisciplinarity, the paper argues for approaching interdisciplinarity as a contingent phenomenon that may not be best explained in the abstract through distinctions of different modes of inter,- trans,- or multi-disciplinarity, but rather through a sensitivity to the specific infrastructures involved in the practical ordering of interdisciplinarity. Doing so, it is raises a concern with the politics of interdisciplinarity, however, it argues for the study of this politics in the space of the ‘infra’ – from below, pointing to the non-human actors involved in shaping modern educational governance.