(National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece)

Abstract: The article seeks to present a brief theoretical foundation, a description of the methodology and an overview of the results of a fifteen-year long educational project, which started in 2004 and continues to the present in the Department of Early Childhood Education (DECE) National & Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). The project comprises a series of consecutive and interconnected experimental teaching interventions, in which early childhood student teachers attempt to cross the boundaries between two different cultural traditions and present theoretical scientific ideas using the techniques of Puppet Theatre and/or Installations. 

The results of over twenty successive interventions illustrate, among others, that the comprehension and occasional management of scientific and epistemological ideas can be achieved by non-experts through transformations that act as bridges between the sciences and the humanities. The learners’ aesthetic values, skills and capacity of artistic expression improved dramatically. The techniques of installations boosted the descriptive level of the demonstration experiments, while the joint presence of teachers with different specialisations and the constant renewal of the topics put to the students contributed to the project’s success.