About Lifelong Education, Administration, & Policy
Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy
Faculty
Enacting Interdisciplinary Curriculum
"Like the musician who longs to play everything he or she can imagine, the educational theorist is frustrated often by the discrepancy that exists between what he or she professes as the ideal curriculum, and what really happens in schools. Research and experience about general curriculum implementation, efforts to implement issues-centered instruction in social studies, and efforts to implement interdisciplinary and core programs offer useful insights for resolving this dilemma. Some of these insights are summarized below.
Any effort to increase the incidence of interdisciplinary curricular organizations in a particular school or district must take account of the local educational situation. To what extent are interdisciplinary connections already being made? Have interdisciplinary programs been attempted in the past? If so, what happened? What knowledge of or experience with such programs to the local teachers and administrators have? How prevalent is the interest in pursuing interdisciplinary programs? These and other questions must be answered before significant steps can be taken to implement interdisciplinary curricular organizations.
Successful curriculum implementation requires special roles for local administrators and teachers. Efforts to implement interdisciplinary core programs have met with greatest success when administrators, particularly principals, demonstrated a high-profile commitment to the realization of the programs. Experience and research have demonstrated that curricular reforms yield the most significant and lasting changes in classrooms when teachers are given genuine opportunities to participate in curriculum and instruction decisions that effect their work.
Identifying the appropriate pace of change for a local school or district is critical to the success of reform efforts. Should participants be immersed in an endeavor to launch directly into a core program, or should changes be pursued in an incremental fashion, moving eventually from correlated to core arrangements? Again, the answer depends on the local education situation. Once the pace of change is determined, teachers must be provided with opportunities to study literature pertinent to the local change effort and to develop curricula and lesson plans that will serve as the basis for the experiences they will provide students. Pilot units and courses should be conducted, evaluated, and revised continually. These tasks require plenty of time (e.g., common planning periods, released time, after-school meetings, and summer curriculum workshops) and a variety of materials, since prepackaged interdisciplinary materials are scarce.
Given most teachers' lack of experience with interdisciplinary programs and the specialized nature of most college and teacher education courses, teachers must be given ample opportunity to examine, discuss, and experiment with the theory and practice behind integrative curricula in order to develop the mindset prerequisite to enacting interdisciplinary studies on a pervasive scale. This obstacle would be easier to confront if preservice teacher education programs introduced students to the possibilities of interdisciplinary studies."
From: Wraga, W.G. (1993). The interdisciplinary imperative for citizenship education. Theory and Research in Social Education, 21(3), pp. 224-225.
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