Integrating the Curriculum

As I work towards creating a grade 11 integrated curriculum, I catch myself asking, why isn't this something that was employed when I was in high school? The more research and planning I undertake towards this project, the more inspired I feel to implement an integrated curriculum in my future classroom.

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When I was in high school, I found myself connecting similar ideas amongst subject areas and creating the same types of projects and evaluative measures across different domaines. What I was learning in Social Studies trickled down into themes that I was learning in History; the presentation that I had to complete in Business was really no different, fundamentally, from the presentation that I had to give in my English course. If all these subjects are interrelated, why wouldn't you integrate them?

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In an integrated curriculum, the overlapping objectives from multiple subjects are combined into one large evaluative objective: for a broad example, consider that having students create a time-capsule from the 1950's, in which each artifact must be made by hand, could integrate History (choosing a historically correct artifact), Art (creating the artifacts) and English (providing written rationale for why each artifact was chosen).

An important facet of student engagement and motivation in the classroom is creating a lesson that is both interesting and real-life applicable and I believe that an integrated curriculum facilitates just that. By intertwining subjects into projects and discussions, I believe, that they naturally become more fruitful, creative. And by creating cross-curricular units and projects, each teachable subject, I believe, becomes more relevant and applicable. 

There have also been studies completed that prove the educational merit of an integrated curriculum. A study from Anne Lowe (1998) entitled L'enseignement de la musique et de la langue seconde: pistes d'integration et consequences sur les apprentissages, evidenced that integrating Music and French education bolsters educational achievement. By incorporating French lessons that were facilitated through musical instruction, students were found to have scored higher on French competency tests as well as those in Music. Thus, it seems that an integrated curriculum not only livens, but betters, the classroom. 

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Moreover, in a video by Hess Academy, middle school teacher Caleb Collier discusses how an integrated curriculum also helps students who struggle with individual subjects to excel. A student may have difficulty in one specific area, but by integrating it with a topic that they excel in, or find interest in, the student has greater motivation and inclination to succeed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoSdGzyVlBs

In today's society, we are encouraged to think across boarders. Businesses, for example, must make use of Mathematics to calculate quotas and costs, English to create documents and presentations, Psychology to estimate customer behaviour, French to translate campaigns. So if schools are meant to ready students for society, shouldn't integrated learning and integrated thinking be an active part of the curriculum?

As a prospective French and English teacher, simple ways that I plan to integrate the two topics, is by using French vocabulary to enrich English vocabulary and vice-versa or, talking about how French and English literary movements affect and inform one another. Even using simple segways to incorporate the two subjects, I believe, can enrich the students' understanding and appreciation for each subject respectively.


Hess Academy, 2014. Integrated Curriculum at Hess Academy, retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoSdGzyVlBs. 

Lowe, S., A.  (1998). L'enseignement de la musique et de la langue seconde : pistes d'intégration et conséquences sur les apprentissages. Canadian Modern Language Review, 54(2), 223- 238.

Encouraging a New Culture of Learning

Last week I was given an assignment in my Fourth year French course: give a multi-media presentation on anything dealing with the Beur subculture, anything which will then be the basis of your other two summative assessments. This assignment seems great right? You can be creative, inquiry driven and be guided by passion, interest. Yet, I have been uninspired, unable to come up with a topic, not really knowing where to start.

It seems that I have been stumped by the traditional model of education, a model that endorses teacher-directed learning that is rooted within a prescribed curriculum. I am so used to fitting into perimeters and memorizing directed knowledge (also known as the banking model of eduation), that I have fallen into the category of a strategic learner--one who completes educational tasks and engages in learning with the goal of academic success--lacking the ability to search for knowledge based on my intrinsic desire to learn, to question.

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As a prospective teacher, this truth both saddens and upsets me. Current literature and educational trends propose a shift in the classroom paradigm to student-directed, inquiry-based learning, in which students are engaged in the learning process by learning about what interests them. Students are to be encouraged to question, to formulate the desire to learn based on individual passions. The "Be's" of education and desired twenty-first century skills emphasize creativity and creative thought, yet this is something that my traditional education has not equipped me to intrinsically exert.

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I want my future students to be deep learners, learners who care about learning to feed a desire to learn. But how can a modern breed of teachers inspire something that they themselves have not learnt through their educational endeavours? This is an issue that troubles me, but I am glad that I am able to confront these issues and reflect upon them now, giving myself time to refine my teaching pedagogy before entering the classroom. I know now, that an important facet of my teaching pedagogy will be inspiring creativity and self-regulated thought in the classroom: I want my students to be motivated and engaged to learn when they are given a self-directed project, not lost and flustered like I currently find myself to be in my endeavour. In order to do this, I need to implement activities that frame the student in the middle of the classroom paradigm, encouraging student-directed, inquiry-based learning, something simple like allowing students to choose their essay topic for English class as opposed to merely prescribing it is a way to implement this paradigm, allowing students to be guided by their own questions. This, too, underscores the importance that teachers are never a master, but are always a student: it is important that teachers accommodate new literature and educational pedagogies that were not available or applied in the contemporary classroom in order to engage in a progressive form of education.

One activity that I plan to use in my future classroom to promote student-driven, inquiry-based education that I have learnt about in my teacher-education courses is Genius Hour, a creative place where students create work based on their own ponderings, an activity that engages in the twenty-first century "Be" of creativity:

Kesler, Chris. What is Genius Hour? An Introduction to Genius Hour in the Classroom. Retrieved from  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFQUtHsWhc.