Integrative and Interdisciplinary Curriculum in the Middle School

Integrated Approaches in Teacher Preparation and Practice

Lisa Harrison, Ellis Hurd, Kathleen Brinegar, Lisa M Harrison, Ellis Hurd, Kathleen Brinegar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000044966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Originally published as a special issue of the Middle School Journal, this book presents integrative curriculum as a foundational element of the middle school.

By addressing the current gap in literature on curriculum integration in the middle grades, this text explores how learning can be organized around authentic concepts or questions which cut across disciplines and speak to young adolescents. Providing a current, nuanced, and comprehensive review of what it means to embrace and implement an interdisciplinary and integrative curriculum, the volume considers how educators can create and deliver a high-quality integrative curriculum which is enjoyable, challenging, and inclusive. Examples of implementation in teacher preparation programs and middle grade classrooms showcase integrative approaches and illustrate how curricula have been key in tackling social inequities, increasing engagement with STEM, and supporting collaboration.

This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics and libraries in the field of Middle School Education, Curriculum Studies, Teacher Education, Theories of Learning, and STEM Education.

Section I
Scholarship Centered in Middle Grades Classrooms

1
The Responsible Change Project

Building a Justice-Oriented Middle School Curriculum Through Critical Service-Learning

Heather Coffey and Steve Fulton

This We Believe Characteristics

• Educators value young adolescents and are prepared to teach them.
• Curriculum is challenging, exploratory, integrative, and relevant.
• A shared vision developed by all stakeholders guides every decision.
• The school includes community and business partners.

In the summer of 2016, a National Writing Project (NWP) site in the southeastern United States received funding from a US Department of Education Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) grant to conduct professional development with practicing teachers around argument writing through the College Ready Writers Program (now College, Career, and Community Writers Program, or C3WP). During this intensive 10-day summer institute, 12 teachers participated in activities and discussions that focused on source-based argument writing using a variety of texts for support. Through the use of routine argument writing, mini-units, extended research argument, and formative assessments, practicing K-16 teachers thought more deeply about how to create opportunities for critical discourse for their students.

Upon conclusion of this professional development, the two facilitators, a pre-service and graduate English methods professor at a large public university in the southeastern United States and an eighth-grade English language arts teacher (Steve) collaborated to implement the program with students attending a high needs public middle school by integrating it into the school’s newly developed eighth-grade curriculum called the Responsible Change Project (RCP). Together, they developed a curriculum that combined elements of C3WP and critical service-learning to move young adolescent students to inquiry and social action. Utilizing a program-matic framework from the NWP’s C3WP (NWP, 2015), Steve engaged his eighth-grade students in lessons, activities, and unit plans, modeling how to ask important questions related to the communities in which they lived. After observing in their communities, students honed their questions, conducted research into the root causes of and perspectives involved in the community issues, and then developed social action plans to address them. In many cases, Steve’s eighth-grade students actually carried out their plans; they wrote, rehearsed, and delivered a TED-style talk to their classmates to inform and argue for a need to take action.

In this paper, we argue that by moving critical service-learning from the margins of curriculum and pedagogy into the foundation of planning, Steve fostered critical thinking and social action with students around issues of importance within their communities. This study examines the experience of one middle school English language arts teacher committed to empowering students to critically inquire into their communities and find voice around issues of social justice. The authors sought to answer the following research questions: (1) How did the combination of C3WP and RCP influence student growth in the intersections of literacy, engagement, and writing? (2) In what ways do middle grades students engage in research and service-learning to foster inquiry and develop their own solutions?

Context

Young adolescents in the United States identify a host of issues and concerns that mirror their parents and older generations. As a result of recent social and economic policies that affect the potential for the success of today’s youth, it has become the mission of justice-oriented educators (Butin, 2003; Conklin & Hughes, 2016) to advocate for students in ways that show them their value and the promise they hold for our future. For example, the expanding wage gap in the southern states has resulted in an increase in the numbers of youth living in poverty. In a widely reported recent Harvard-Berkeley study, the city closest to the town where we conducted our research ranked 50th out of the 50 largest US cities and 97th of the 100 largest US cities for economic mobility (Chetty, Hendren, Kline, & Saez, 2014). To provide more specific context, in 2016, the governor approved the controversial HB2 law preventing transgender kids from using the restrooms in which they feel most comfortable while at school. Further, the murder and incarceration rate of young African American males has consistently increased over all other racial groups year after year. Finally, since the 2016 election, increased ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids and the termination of DACA (Bruno, 2017) have raised awareness and terror among undocumented student populations across the state. All in all, the rights of marginalized populations are under assault in this state and across the country. This negativity prompted Steve and his colleagues to consider ways in which they might challenge middle school students to identify causes of concern in their communities and encourage them to conduct research around ways to promote positive change. Thus, they developed a curriculum to foster social justice through service-learning, critical literacy, and inquiry—this became the RCP.

Engendering a Social Justice Perspective

According to Brameld (2000), “Education has two major roles: to transmit culture and to modify culture. When American culture is in a state of crisis, the second of these roles—that of modifying and innovating—becomes more important” (p. 75). To educators dedicated to social justice, the goal of teaching becomes promoting equity and helping students to understand the relationship between power and oppression (Matteson & Boyd, 2017). By combining critical service-learning with deep, critical reflective reading of texts, or critical literacy, teachers can challenge students to engage in social action to improve conditions for their communities.

Service-learning, a type of pedagogy that combines community service and intentional content connected to academic learning goals, has long been identified as a promising practice for middle school classrooms (Kaye, 2010; Wilhelm, 2009). In 2009, Wilhelm suggested that a curriculum based in service-learning has the potential for engaging middle school students in authentic learning and developing students as change agents. In fact, Wilhelm (2009) recommended that every school implement service-learning across the content areas. Further, Glickman and Thompson (2009) argued for the importance of adding service-learning into the middle school curriculum, citing a moment where teachers must push back against standardization. They provide detailed steps for teachers hoping to implement a service-learning curriculum using the Preparation, Action, Reflection, and Celebration (PARC) Model (RMC, 2009). This method of service-learning follows the traditional expectations of planning, acting, and reflecting, while also enabling middle school students to celebrate or share their work as a demonstration to the community.

Mitchell (2008) differentiated critical service-learning from the traditional model of service-learning, suggesting that more traditional methods of service-learning assume that social justice is already present in the teaching of skills and content, whereas critical service-learning requires instructors to incorporate activities and reflections that motivate a social change orientation, engage students in examination of redistribution of power, and develop authentic relationships. As such, students participating in critical service-learning must learn to view themselves as agents of social change and “use the experience of service to address and respond to injustice in communities” (p. 51) (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Adapted from Mitchell, T. (2008). Traditional versus Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models

Source: Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 14(2), 50–65, under the Creative Commons Attribution License

Similarly, Hart (2006) defines critical service-learning as “rooted in the aim of connecting academic instruction to the social, political, and economic conditions of students’ lived experiences” (p. 18).

When integrating a critical service-learning pedagogy into an English language arts course, teachers have a perfect opportunity to develop critical literacy with their students. Butler (2017) explained, “where and how young people engage in acts of being, speaking, reading, writing, and meaning-making are intricately connected to these young people’s lives and livelihood” (p. 84). More specifically, teachers dedicated to this type of liberatory pedagogy (Freire, 1970) find ways to develop critical literacy with students through promoting inquiry into community issues and making connections to course content. By critiquing texts of all mediums for themes of power (Luke, 2000), learners unmask inequity and begin to act for social change. While engaging in this study, we noticed that the intersections of critical service-learning and critical literacy give life to a social justice perspective.

The Responsible Change Project

Over the course of an academic semester, Steve led his eighth-grade English language arts students in activities designed to challenge them to think about concerns within their communities. Focused on social justice inquiry, research, informal and formal research-based writing, service-learning, and TED-talk style presentations, Steve facilitated a curriculum that also included discussion and reflection along the way. As students began to conduct research into their topics on a larger scale, they consulted primary documents, informational texts, and even social media to gauge the degree to which their concerns were related to the national conversation on the topic.

The level of research, analysis, and writing that Steve expected from his students throughout this project required several high-level skills as a continuation of instruction from the first semester during the implementation of the early assignments in the NWP’s C3WP curriculum. This program focused students’ attention on different aspects of argument writing that drew on informational texts as sources. Early in the year, for example, students worked on developing a claim in response to reading several texts on immigration. At another time, while reading texts about the subject of reality television, students created a piece of writing that not only made a clear claim but also selected appropriate evidence from the text to support that claim and develop an argument. Other skills students learned during the first semester included commenting on and integrating source material into their writing, developing a clear line of reasoning, and addressing opposing viewpoints. This sustained and recursive exposure to developing an argument prepared Steve’s students to apply the skills they learned in the close-reading and argument writing that the RCP asked of them.

The authors originally engaged in this work to test the potential of the C3WP curriculum for engaging middle school students in developing writing and communication skills around the state’s English language arts curriculum. While providing space for developing curricular skills around topics of interest, Steve enabled students to develop a deeper connection with these topics and with the community in which they lived. In what follows, we explain how students developed critical literacy, engaged in social and political discussions, and improved their writing and communication skills.

Methodology

The authors conducted this exploratory case study as a pilot study to determine the potential outcomes of coupling the C3WP curriculum with the RCP. Over the course of one semester, the first author observed and participated in planning sessions with Steve as he implemented the RCP. The authors sought to determine the potential for combining C3WP curriculum with critical literacy and service-learning to promote a social justice perspective. In this pilot study, Steve tested the curriculum so that the school could implement it on a larger scale with the entire eighth grade the following year. At the time of the study, Steve, a white male, had been teaching eighth-grade English language arts in this ethnically and socioeconomically diverse Title I middle school for 14 years. Students’ self-identification of their ethnicity included 45% white students, 31% black students, 19% Hispanic students, 2% Asian students, and 3% students who identified with two or more races. In regard to socioeconomic status demographics, approximately 65% of students were eligible for free lunch, 20% of students were eligible for reduced lunch, and 15% of students were ineligible for free or reduced lunch.

Using participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006), a form of qualitative research methods, the authors analyzed the data through iterative coding and triangulated with member checking and co-authorship. This process enabled the identification of themes related to the guiding research questions and confirmed the validity of the processes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• SECTION I Scholarship Centered in Middle Grades Classrooms
• SECTION II Middle Level Teacher Preparation
• Index