Our experiment with trying to integrate the four core subjects around a common theme has started to become more and more interesting as more teachers are about to get involved in 2009. I am not convinced many teachers, myself included, fully appreciate the radical changes required for what James A Beane calls "curriculum integration". It is quite different from teachers selecting themes and making sure any overlaps that could occur between what happens, do actually occur. Student-centred curriculum integration according to Beane is much more than this which he refers to as "multi-disciplinary education" with no real democratic mandate. What is required instead is for teachers to help students generate genuine problems and then have students explore these. The subject teachers provide expertise when asked and when it is required or arrange the expertise from the community. There are a whole lot of practical issues at stake here. But here is an illustration of what I think it could mean.
Recently a teacher started teaching a unit on world religions. There was considerable fuss from some students about this because they were anti religion and didn't want it "forced down their throat". In a teacher-centred approach, the problem is one of behaviour management. Kids need to sit down and listen to what we have to say about world religions. In a student-centred approach the real life issues and beliefs the students have about religion are your first resource.
There is a lot of talk about "diagnostic assessment" in order to gather "base line data" about what students already know, as if knowledge is somehow a static thing which needs to be lifted from their individual brain. Personally I have done a lot of this without really knowing why and have never looked at it again.
For this religion topic each group was given a large piece of paper with some questions such as "Religion should be taught at this school", "religion should not be taught at this school", "what does Sept 11 have to do with religion", "what are some world problems associated with religion" "what benefits does religion offer to the world". Each kid had a vivid and responded and the paper was passed around until each group had their paper back with everyone's comments. A student centred approach suddenly makes this diagnostic assessment critical to what happens next. A teacher centred approach would not have done this and would have answered a whole lot of unasked questions. As Karl Popper says, "Never answer unasked questions!!" The responses from students were of course extremely interesting unlike much diagnostic testing which is very boring.
The problem here though is what next? I am still working this one out. Students don't know what they don't know. I think they need a few things thrown at them before choosing a problem which they inquire into. For example, they could be given some accounts of some controversial religious issues such as the Danish cartoons, the Sudanese teddy bear named Muhammed or the issues of banning headscarfs and Christian scarfs in schools. The teacher needs to listen to see what happens. Perhaps next they could be introduced to Dawkins and atheism, since many are so concerned about it. We have a staff member who is happy to come and talk to them about atheism and religion. The difficulty is when to stop introducing them, perturbing them, shaking them up a bit and let them actually start inquiring into a problem with an authentic outcome.
When they have enough ideas to explore something it starts to get exciting. I love the idea of the extreme atheist who made a comment about the "pathetic" denial of evolution investigating evolution, creationism and intelligient design. There were some students who were very insightful about the discrimation many Muslims suffered after the Sept 11 attacks. They could go to the local Mosque and interview them down there, see if it is still hapeening in NZ and write up the results in an article. Of course the major difficulty is the timetable which operates in 1 hour blocks but this is being changed for our school next year.
Perhaps the journalism teacher, also their dean, could help with producing a class magazine with all their articles. These are only some ideas but this is when education becomes exciting. We lecture when the students ask for it, which they will. We teach skills when they stumble, which they will. We discovered that even the most able students found something as easy as summarising the class' responses to a key question extremely difficult. That's when you have a lesson of how to summarise information and discuss why this might be a useful skill.
James A Beane is right though. Simply encouraging overlaps between the material that teachers "cover" is hardly going to change much.
