Overview

OVERVIEW:

Years ago, Dr. Madeline Hunter identified the teaching component of transfer. This means that we learn best when what we are learning is somehow linked to what we already know or if several things we are trying to learn are somehow linked together. This is the basis for curricular integration. We believe, based on our reading of research by Dr. James Beane, that students learn better if they see the world not as neat boxes that separate curricular areas but as an integrated whole. With that integration, students should learn more easily and remember more of what they learn.

While this is accepted practice at many middle schools, our middle school has only existed as such for three years. In that time, one major unit and several smaller efforts, involving two or three curricular areas, have been accomplished. We now want to take the next step to a regularly integrated curriculum. Our project is to design a model into which any curricular area can plug to achieve integration with as few as one other curricular area to as many as exist in the school.

In a class we used to call shop or industrial arts, students used to learn how to operate a table saw. They did not spend a semester learning all the parts of the saw, how to take it apart and put it back together, and how to turn it on. They received enough instruction to safely operate the saw and then they spent the rest of the semester making things with it. It was a tool.

Subject-area specialists are concerned that their content area will be lost or, at least, watered down, by curricular integration. That is not the intent. Students still learn English, math, science, social studies, music, art, foreign languages, business skills, and everything else; but they will learn it in a context that mirrors the real world and that provides for that transfer and retention to occur. Math and science and other subject areas are tools to be applied to real world problem-solving. They are part of an integrated whole.

We realize that this project will not take us all the way down the road that Dr. Beane would like us to travel. Our scope is to get our teachers used to the idea of working together and moving farther out of their own boxes and into the larger whole. Once we have accomplished that, it will be easier to travel farther down the road with Dr. Beane. Then we can begin to talk about letting the learners determine their own areas of interest and the tools they need to learn about them.