Some issues with integrating around Natural Disasters

We have just finished our second attempt at an integrated unit which I was full of hope for. It didn’t work in quite the way I had anticipated but as a learning exercise it was very useful. All core teachers seemed to see how we could integrate with the theme of natural disasters. However, I had Dewey (1910) ringing in my ears when he said:

“Instruction in subject matter that does not fit into any problem already stirring in the student’s own experience, or that is not presented in such a way as to arouse a problem, is worse than useless for intellectual purposes”.

Our first hurdle to overcome was that ‘natural disasters’ was not a theme or topic that emerged from stimulus material and interaction between students and teachers; we had imposed the topic so if it was going to work I was going to have to present it in a way that “aroused a problem” in the minds of students. What we had planned looked as if it was going to mostly be what the diagram refers to as a multidisciplinary model of integration. I’ll explain how we could have changed that shortly but first a very quick overview of the unit.

The learning intention for the unit was based on a level 5 AO but tailored to some reading I had done in the last school holidays on disaster studies. It was “we are learning that natural disasters are made worse through social, economic and political conditions”. Disasters studies academics define two broad approaches to the causes of disasters although the one in the “causes of natural disasters” diagram used three. As far as learning about society and how it functions is concerned, the radical/structural approach is the most interesting and critical one and in all my diagnostic assessment not one that students automatically consider. In fact, at first they actively resisted it. To look at events which disrupt society from a radical/structural perspective requires an orientation to the world that is different from all mainstream messages from media and what is usually considered commonsensical. It proved very hard to show students the crucial difference between a natural hazard and a natural disaster, a natural hazard being a potential threat and a disaster when that threat affects society in catastrophic ways. Conveniently there was a huge earthquake in Fiordland at the time of the unit that had very little effect on society. I used this as an example to explain that had this same event affected Wellington, for example, it would have been a disaster (the NZ geography syllabus apparently uses different words to differentiate between hazards and disasters, and “disaster” is not a word they use at all. However, actual geographers and anthropologists use words such as hazard, risk and disaster).

Anyway, “mother nature” is usually the reason given for natural disasters and they are also usually considered politically neutral because extreme natural events obviously don’t differentiate according to age, sex, class, ethnicity etc… I wanted students to be able to explain at the end of the unit, why it is that some people are more vulnerable than others to events such as floods, hurricanes and earthquakes. This is important, of course, because although we can’t stop most natural hazards we can ask questions about why some people are more vulnerable than others (and often times we can even prevent natural hazards and disasters themselves – such as when corporations deforest areas making people - usually poor, rarely white - vulnerable to landslides as took place in Taiwan towards the end of the unit).

What happened during the unit was that we four teachers, when it worked, used the theme to frame what we were probably already intending to do. The whole project fitted fairly squarely within what Bean calls the “multidisciplinary” paradigm and hence – didn’t engage students to the extent they could have been. Part of the problem, I think, is that what I was teaching them in social studies was some quite good ideas about how society works – but it didn’t succeed in implicating students in society as active citizens and therefore demanding some kind of response. The “ideas about society” aspect of social studies has to come after something else, after some kind of social action which students genuinely perceive as a problem worth exploring and perhaps solving. This is where place-based projects and action-oriented techniques aimed at including and empowering youth are essential for the social studies teacher.