INTEGRATING CURRICULA

Marion Brady

Howard BradyCenter for Integrated Curricula

OUR STUDENTS ARE FACED WITH AN AVALANCHE OF INFORMATION:

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Television

Environment

Parents

Peers

Magazines

Internet

NewspapersLibraries

Teachers

Textbooks

The quantity of information grows geometrically…

FOR EXAMPLE

A survey of four popular eighth-grade textbooks identified 1,465 concepts thought by the authors to be important and difficult enough to include in their glossaries.

Doctors report that students are developing back problems from the weight of textbooks in their backpacks.

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THE THEORY SEEMS TO BE

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enough mud on the wall, some of it is bound to stick.”

BUT…

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There’s a problem.

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Much of what’s “taught” and “learned” (at great cost in time and money) is soon forgotten.

WHY? WHAT’S WRONG?

Maybe the basic assumption is wrong, that “educated” means merely “having a lot of information in mental storage.”

Shouldn’t “educated” mean, “able to make more sense of self, of others, of the world, of experience, of life?”

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MAKING MORE SENSE OF LIFE?

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“Making more sense of life” means making more sense of immediate experience, more sense of the real world, right here, right now. It means making more sense, say, of buying a pair of socks.

MAKING MORE SENSE OF LIFE:

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We want a pair of socks. Those available have been knitted in a third world country.

MAKING SENSE OF LIFE:

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Power to run the knitting machines is supplied by burning fossil fuels:

MAKING SENSE OF LIFE:

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Burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming.

MAKING SENSE OF LIFE:

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Global warming alters weather patterns.

MAKING SENSE OF LIFE:

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Altered weather patterns trigger environmental catastrophes.

MAKING SENSE OF LIFE:

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Environmental catastrophes destroy infrastructure.

MAKING SENSE OF LIFE:

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Money spent for infrastructure replacement isn’t available for health care.

MAKING SENSE OF LIFE:

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Declines in the quality of health care affect mortality rates.

MAKING SENSE OF LIFE:

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Mortality is a matter of life and death.

MAKING SENSE OF LIFE:

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Buying socks, then, is a matter of life and death.

THE PROBLEM?

Buying a pair of socks is simple. Ordinary. Routine.But making sense of it (which is what education is supposed to help us do) turns out to require, at the very least, some understanding of marketing, physics, chemistry, meteorology, economics, engineering, psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology…

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THE PROBLEM:

…And it requires an understanding of the relationships between these fields of knowledge.

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THE PROBLEM:

Making sense of experience requires the seamless weaving together of knowledge. Fields of study are now walled off from each other with awkward, artificial, arbitrary boundaries. Because of this, our brains are denied, in real and immediate ways, access to the raw materials essential for productive, creative thought.

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IT’S A REAL PROBLEM.“It is a well-known scandal that our whole

educational system is geared more to categorizing and analyzing patches of knowledge than to threading them together.” (Harlan Cleveland)

“Students rarely have an opportunity to discover what one set of ideas has to do with another.” (Philip Sabaratta)

“Our educational systems…are now primarily designed to teach people specialized knowledge—to enable students to divide and dissect knowledge. At the heart of this pattern of teaching is…a view of the world that is quite simply false.” (James Coomer)

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“All of our experience should have made it clear by now that faculty and students will not derive from a list of disjointed courses a coherent curriculum revealing the necessary interdependence of knowledge.” (Daniel Tanner)

“The division into subjects and periods encourages a segmented rather than an integrated view of knowledge. Consequently, what students are asked to relate to in schooling becomes increasingly artificial, cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect.” (John I. Goodlad)

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INTEGRATING CURRICULA

The boundaries between school subjects are barriers to understanding.

We propose to integrate curricula by building, in students’ minds, a unifying and organizing framework for all knowledge.

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THIS MENTAL FRAMEWORK WILL ALLOW STUDENTS TO:

Identify relevant informationEstablish relative levels of significance

Place data in contextFind relationships between various pieces of information

Tie everything together to make sense of complex reality. 24

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FAILING TO GIVE STUDENTS A MENTAL FRAMEWORK FOR KNOWLEDGE…

…may be the biggest single failure of education today. Even if our goal is simply to help them remember information long enough to pass the standardized test, the right framework provides the “storage slots” for this information.

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If our goal is to improve our students’ abilities to understand and cope with complex reality, an adequate framework is even more essential.

A SINGLE FRAMEWORK IS NEEDED.

As we saw, all of reality is linked. Making sense of it requires a single framework capable of linking seemingly unrelated information.

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