Cross-Curricular Teaching in the Primary School

Planning and facilitating imaginative lessons

Trevor Kerry, Trevor Kerry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317659167
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How can teaching across the curriculum improve children's learning?

How can you plan meaningful, imaginative topic work?

Cross-Curricular Teaching in the Primary School helps teachers plan a more imaginative, integrated curriculum by presenting in accessible language a rationale and framework for teaching across the subjects. This second edition has been fully updated in light of the new curriculum, and shows how cross-curricular work can contribute to deeper subject knowledge.

Illustrated throughout with examples of effective topic work in successful schools, this book provides guidance on the underpinning theory and strategies to facilitate cross-curricular work with young children. With a new structure to emphasise the importance of careful planning and preparation, issues covered include:

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• How children learn

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• The theory and rationale behind the cross-curricular approach

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• Developing the curriculum and lesson planning

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• Teaching and learning in an integrated way at KS1 and KS2

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• Cross-curricular approaches for maths

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• Whole school approaches and team teaching for cross-curricular teaching

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• The role of support staff in cross-curricular teaching

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• Improving children's thinking skills

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• Supporting children with special needs

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• Using new media and drama to facilitate cross-curricular learning

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• Assessing cross-curricular learning.

Cross-Curricular Teaching in the Primary School provides much needed support for busy student and practising teachers. Packed with practical ideas, it offers an accessible guide to all aspects of introducing an integrated curriculum.

Part 1

Some theoretical issues

Chapter 1

Introducing cross-curricular teaching

The conceptual underpinning

Trevor Kerry

Introduction

This chapter examines the notion of integrated or cross-curricular studies as a way of organising curriculum in schools. Drawing on the insights of educational philosophy, curriculum theory, and learning theory (though see also Chapter 2 for this last), it establishes the soundness of a theoretical case for this approach. It examines what this view means for the art and science of teaching, and notes examples of successful cross-curricular approaches in schools. The chapter identifies the roots of this philosophy in the thinking of the Plowden Report (1967), and suggests that the approach is equally valid today, albeit adapted for today’s contexts.

Background

Five decades ago, Plowden (1967) made an important assertion that was later blamed (erroneously, if theorists like Eisner (1996) and practitioners like Campbell and Kerry (2004) are right) for a diminution in children’s knowledge. It was this: ‘Throughout our discussion of curriculum we stress that children’s learning does not fit into subject categories’ (Plowden 1967: para. 555).

Throughout a long career in education I have been convinced not only that this assertion is correct but that it applies equally to effective learning in any context. Clearly, I have expressed this view vehemently, as Spooner (2014) notes, referring to the first edition of this book, that, ‘most of these themes are further developed by Kerry (2011), an experienced practitioner and researcher renowned for his work in this area, in his armamentarium for an integrated approach’. Clyde (1995: 115) shares my view and talks of children’s learning as ‘an interpretive network which spreads across domains’. The Trinidadian Minister for Education certainly concurs with this view (www.trinidadianexpress.com/news, accessed January 2014). She notes that, ‘according to the academic literature, the more you connect knowledge for a child the better they learn. And this mode enables learners to perceive new relationships, new models and create new systems and structures in their thinking. So it is not limiting the child in any way. It is unleashing the creative potential of the child.’ Hus and Grmek (2011: 160) maintain that, ‘besides acquiring new knowledge, the emphasis [in what they call project lessons – ed.] is also on motivation, acquiring practical knowledge and developing social learning’. Closer to home, Education Scotland (www.educationscotland.gov.uk) is unequivocal:

Interdisciplinary learning enables teachers and learners to make connections in their learning through exploring clear and relevant links across the curriculum. It supports the use and application of what has been taught and learned in new and different ways and provides opportunities for deepening learning, for example through answering big questions, exploring an issue, solving problems or completing a final project. Learning beyond subject boundaries provides learners with the opportunity to experience deep, challenging and relevant learning.

The vehemence of the ‘subject discipline’ lobby, however, at least in England, is so assertive and politically aggressive that it is comforting to find others who espouse the integration viewpoint – especially when those others include such intellectual greats as the American scientist Stephen Jay Gould (McGarr and Rose 2007). Gould must have met opposition to his integrationist view, because the chapter he wrote (with Rhonda Shearer, in McGarr and Rose 2007: 59–63) is couched in powerful prose:

The contingent and largely arbitrary nature of disciplinary boundaries has unfortunately been reinforced, even made to seem ‘natural’ by our [i.e. human beings’ – ed.] drive to construct dichotomies – with science versus art as perhaps the most widely accepted of all.

(p. 59)

They go on:

The worst and deepest stereotypes drive a particularly strong wedge between art (viewed as an ineffably ‘creative’ activity, based on personal idiosyncrasy and subject only to hermeneutical interpretation) and science (viewed as a universal and rational enterprise based on factual affirmation and analytical coherence) … If art and science could join forces by stressing our common methods in critical thinking, our common search for innovation, and our common respect for historical achievement – rather than emphasizing our disparate substrates and trying to profit from the differences in playing a zero-sum game at the other’s expense – then we might, in Benjamin Franklin’s remarkably relevant pun, truly hang together rather than hang separately.

(p. 60)

This chapter intends to provide a rationale and some conceptual underpinning for this belief in the integrated nature of knowledge and understanding in order that like-minded educators in any context (and indeed, in any phase) may be able to justify their approach on the basis of the best elements in educational thought. It then goes on to explore the implications of cross-curricular content in education. Unlike the deliberately constructed exclusivity of the ‘disciplines’ lobby, the case for integration embraces both approaches as valuable, as Stephen Jay Gould (above) urges us to. If this chapter succeeds then, at the end of it, only those who feel most threatened by their inability to cope with integration, who line up with the deepest vested interests in ideology, and feel the least appreciation for evidence and reasoned argument, should be able to cling to the ‘disciplines’ lobby as the sole and exclusive truth.

Analogies are always dangerous, but it is worth risking one at this point. The relationship between ‘disciplines’ and integration is not unlike that between being a joiner and becoming a master carpenter/cabinet-maker. Both joiners on a building site and cabinet-makers in hand-crafting workshops have to know and understand the medium (wood), the tools (their functions and practical handling), and the processes of carpentry. But only a Chippendale goes on to have the conceptual skills, the design acumen and the aesthetic understanding to create quality products that exceed the disciplines of the trade to become works of art. Chippendale and his like are a million miles away in both levels of skills and, importantly, range of understandings, from making formwork for pouring concrete.

The problem

At the heart of the problem lies what is learned and how it is learned – I shall talk mainly about learning in schools, especially primary schools, but the context is easily widened by the reader, and is widened here from time to time to establish the point of the argument. The root question is, ‘Should learning be divided into segments known as “subjects”, or would it be better and more effectively acquired in some more homogeneous form?’

Answering this question is difficult, not because the answer is obscure but simply because a complete answer has many strands. Within the compass of this I will attempt to deal, albeit cursorily, with just four of them. If the answer is difficult it is because it defies convention (and people, even teachers, fear change) and because that convention itself supports a structure of vested interests.

The four strands that I will deal with, in turn, are these:

1 The supposed reality of ‘subject disciplines’

2 Theories and models of curriculum

3 Theories and models of learning

4 Models of teaching that underpin integrated studies.

For teachers and those in training it is important to note that part of one’s professionalism is to be able to justify and articulate the way in which one works; understanding the rationale that under-pins cross-curricular teaching is essential to putting it into action effectively in the classroom.

The supposed reality of ‘subject disciplines’

Why do some educators oppose the use of integrated or cross-curricular approaches to learning in schools? Generally, the answer rests with convictions about how knowledge is constructed. The conventional argument goes something like this: Knowledge falls naturally into ‘domains’, called subjects, which are bounded by specific kinds of conceptual thinking, specific ways of constructing knowledge that fit the content of the subject, and by procedures that are specific to that content.

This view, or something approximating to it, has become embedded into educational practice and to depart from it requires a kind of intellectual conversion. But how accurate is it?

The problem is best explored through an example. To avoid becoming mired in controversy and emotional attachment to a subject on the primary timetable, let us take a neutral stance and talk in a detached way about the subject area physics (which appears rarely, if ever, on primary timetables); the principles can then be applied to other areas of learning. Physics is a ‘subject discipline’ in conventional thought. So what makes a physicist distinctive compared with a chemist or a theologian? First he (or, of course throughout, she) will have a content knowledge that is bounded by ‘how the world works’, the laws of the universe – at a simple level, the characteristics that define how electric current flows. Our physicist will have a scientific or positivist approach to problem solving: hypothesising, testing and observation, drawing conclusions, constructing a theory or law – and a multiplicity of these will provide a conceptual view of the universe. Then he will use particular conventions to record and communicate his discoveries and other information (symbols, formulae and so on).

So far, so good; every pupil, even in primary school lessons on electric circuits, for example, has experienced this. So then our pupil moves on to a lesson whose focus is rooted more in chemistry (again, I have avoided a subject on the typical primary timetable for the sake of neutralising the example). What changes? Well, not the scientific process and underpinning. Nor the use of particular conventions to record discoveries and information, even though the actual symbols and language may be slightly different – volts and forces may be replaced by valency and states of matter. What has changed fundamentally is not the approach to knowledge but the content of the lesson: the difference between physics and chemistry is in large measure down to content: what is learned, not how it is learned.

But (the reader may be thinking) this example is a poor one because we are comparing two closely allied ‘subjects’ – they are, after all, both sciences. Fine; then select theology (and again, as noted above, to distance ourselves from personal attachment to the argument and actual primary school timetables we will use this term rather than RE here) instead of chemistry. Theologians have specific subject knowledge (systems, sacred books, rituals); but they too ‘solve problems’ such as ethical hypotheses, based on observations (of human and divine acts), collect evidence (of good and evil), draw conclusions (moral codes), and speak in symbols (Allah, sacraments). All that has really changed is the content of their studies, not the epistemology that underpins them.

Then, all three of our ‘subject specialists’ – the physicist, the chemist, the theologian – find themselves moving out of primary school into higher education, teaching their subjects to undergraduates, and behold! Each is trying to offer a rationale for the universe, an explanation for human and material events, and ideas about how people should live within the contexts of the physical, chemical or spiritual universe, and even how their own subjects ‘work’. So they all become philosophers!

Their answers and starting points may be different but they are bounded by the same concerns, the same need to establish conceptual structures, the same need to communicate knowledge, and the same requirements to invent symbols and laws to make sense of the universe. Their perspectives may be conditioned more or less by their content concerns, but their knowledge operates quite similarly and to quite similar ends. What distinguishes ‘subjects’ is not, at root, their ‘distinctive disciplines’ but rather their ‘distinctive content’ – and even then that content is, or may be, directed to similar core purposes.

Furthermore, while the physicist, the chemist and the theologian may each have a conte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of case studies
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword to the first edition
• Foreword and introduction to the second edition
• How to use this book
• PART 1 Some theoretical issues
• PART 2 Cross-curricular learning and teaching in EYFS and Key Stage 1
• PART 3 Cross-curricular learning and teaching in Key Stage 2
• PART 4 Helping exceptional pupils in cross-curricular lessons
• PART 5 Planning and assessing cross-curricular work
• PART 6 Some specific techniques for cross-curricular teaching and learning
• PART 7 Drawing together the threads of cross-curricular thinking
• Index