Curriculum Integration

Curriculum Integration
J. A. Gibbons

Well, to be honest I had to read this paper a couple times and I really don’t know if I fully understand the examples of “curriculum integration” in this paper. Personally, I want to read something that gets to the point, in plain ole’ English. So from what I understand and what he concluded in his paper 30 years ago may still be true today; one teacher doesn’t know enough about two disciplines to integrate them. Five years ago, when I started clinicals and student teaching, integrating different subject areas and creating interdisciplinary units were a staple, especially at the elementary level. It seemed to be easier at the elementary level to gather teachers together to develop and teach these types of lessons. While working in the middle school level it seems like teachers need to follow a compound curriculum, where lesson one is taught, then lesson two and so on, which results in no time to explore other elements or disciplines.

After reading this paper, some questions arose such as, how can we improve our teaching through integration? Do teachers know how to integrate different disciplines together? How do we as teacher know when we are integrating? So these questions lead me to wonder, are we really “integrating” technology or other disciplines within our curriculum, or are we just saying we are. The integration of two subject areas requires the knowledge of more than one teacher as well as meeting the goals of both subject areas in order to unify them. We also need to distinguish between interdisciplinary lessons versus integrated lessons. It easy enough to incorporate different disciplines in your lessons, such as art or technology, but are you really enhancing the subject matter and knowledge learned. As teachers we need to work together to figure out how to connect subject areas together, but where the problem lies is how to meet curricular goals in both areas in order to “unify parts so that the result is more than the sum of these parts (Gibbons)”