Integrating Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

Issues, Reflections, and Ways Forward

Léonie Rennie, Grady Venville, John Wallace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136636684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How can curriculum integration of school science with the related disciplines of technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) enhance students' skills and their ability to link what they learn in school with the world outside the classroom?

Featuring actual case studies of teachers' attempts to integrate their curriculum, their reasons for doing so, how they did it, and their reflections on the outcomes, this book encourages science educators to consider the purposes and potential outcomes of this approach and raises important questions about the place of science in the school curriculum. It takes an honest approach to real issues that arise in curriculum integration in a range of education contexts at the elementary and middle school levels. The clear documentation and critical analysis of the contribution of science in curriculum integration—its implementation and its strengths and weaknesses—will assist teachers, science educators, and researchers to understand how this approach can work to engage students and improve their learning, as well as how it does not happen easily, and how various factors can facilitate or hinder successful integration.

1

EXPLORING CURRICULUM INTEGRATION

Why Integrate?

Léonie Rennie, John Wallace, and Grady Venville

Introduction

We live in a connected, global community. Issues involving science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are commonplace in the media. Newsworthy events from all corners of the Earth are relayed immediately to our place of residence through a world-wide communication network. Real-time images of natural disasters, conflicts within and between countries, politicians and other leaders discussing issues relating to finance, terrorism, and human suffering, are flashed to our digital screens. Teenagers and adults alike communicate instantly with words and pictures on hand-held devices that not long ago were the province of science fiction. So much technological advancement; yet the future seems increasingly uncertain. All countries experience natural disasters of some kind; the destructive effects of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and wild fires are compounded by human suffering from hunger, disease, and lack of shelter. Further, no country is immune from terrorism and political unrest, or the threat created by hacking into the electronic communication networks on which we increasingly depend. We cannot predict with much accuracy the kind of world that children will occupy in the next decade.

We might hope that school education will reflect these rapid global changes and the continuing challenges relating to health and the environment. We might hope that the curriculum will foster the kind of connectedness that reflects the way the world works outside of school and assist students to develop the knowledge and ability to deal with change and challenge in sensible ways. We might expect that, as the world changes, our school systems will respond accordingly, ensuring that our youth leave school as informed citizens of the world. But we know that school systems do not adapt quickly to changing needs and, very often, curricula do not encourage such an outward-looking focus.

How can we ensure that educational curricula are designed and enacted to ready our children for the changing world outside of school? This is an old question. In 1949, Ralph Tyler wrote a classic text about curriculum entitled Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. In it he asked four basic questions about curriculum: “What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?” “How can learning experiences be selected which are likely to be useful in attaining these objectives?” “How can learning experiences be organized for effective instruction?” and “How can the effectiveness of learning experiences be evaluated?” These remain the four questions to which educators still struggle to find answers, as illustrated by the variety of curricula evident in various countries and the diversity of views about their suitability.

The Structure of School Curricula

Now, well into the 21st century, the structure of school curricula is dominated by disciplines such as physics, mathematics, history, and literature (Scott, 2008). This pattern has existed for many decades, in the sense that disciplines, such as chemistry, physics, and biology, are readily recognized as subjects in school timetables from the past and present. Support for a disciplinary approach to curriculum flows from the belief that disciplines, like those of science and mathematics, provide specialized knowledge that enables rigorous explanation of clearly identified aspects of the world. It is argued that disciplines create a sense of order about the complex world and provide students with the understandings and skills they need to solve focused discipline-based problems (Gardner, 2004). However, most of the world’s problems do not involve only one discipline; they involve many. Put another way, most school curricula are based on separate disciplines, but the world’s problems are multidisciplinary and require input from many disciplines to solve them. There is another concern about the dominance of disciplines in school curricula. Rogers (1997) argued that the translation of “knowledge” from the discipline to the school subject is problematic, because the knowledge-building processes of the discipline are often lost, leaving content—the concepts and facts—disconnected from the modes of inquiry that established them. The result is a sterile, dehumanized science content that has little appeal to students and is often perceived by them to be irrelevant (Aikenhead, 2006). Further, this kind of curriculum is far removed from the practice of science in the “real world” (Hodson, 1998).

Dividing knowledge into subjects for teaching and learning in schools is a practical way to organize school timetables and deliver the curriculum (Hatch, 1998), but it is not necessarily an effective way of teaching students about the world outside of school. There are many progressive school programs that do not fit with the usual disciplinary structure of curricula and deliver programs that are “integrated,” or interdisciplinary. Examples of such curricula include contextualized instruction (e.g., Rivet & Krajcik, 2008), futures studies (e.g., Lloyd & Wallace, 2004), holistic education (e.g., Miller, 2007), place-based education (e.g., Gruenewald & Smith, 2008), and science, technology, society, and environment (e.g., Pedretti & Nazir, 2011).

What these curricula have in common is a breaking down of the boundaries between traditional school subjects, bringing more than one subject to bear on the topic of interest. These curricula are described as integrated, deriving from the Latin word integratus, meaning to combine, to make whole, or bring together. Arguments supporting an integrated approach flow from the notion that curriculum should be about the problems, issues, and concerns posed by life itself. In the context of middle schools, proponents of integration argue that adolescents’ learning should be about life experiences in familiar, local contexts, as well as issues in the larger, global world. Because it is based on issues of personal and social concern, such a curriculum is argued to be more relevant and motivating for students (Beane, 1995). This more holistic view enables the connections between local concerns and global problems to become a central part of the curriculum. Using disciplinary knowledge with narrow reasoning processes is inconsistent with this way of understanding knowledge (O’Loughlin, 1994); instead the disciplines become helpful only when they impinge on these issues and problems. Thus we see that having an integrated curriculum does not “do away” with the disciplines; rather they are called upon when needed to provide their specialized knowledge in context.

With these points of view in mind, and in the context of Tyler’s (1949) first question, “What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?” we might ask two further questions: Do students need strong disciplinary knowledge to cope in today’s changing world, or do they need cross-disciplinary, integrated knowledge? Should students learn about local issues, or focus on issues of global significance? We think the answer to these questions is “all of these things.” The curriculum challenge is to strike an appropriate balance between disciplinary and integrated knowledge, and build the connections between local and global issues. How might we do this?

In subsequent chapters of this book, we present case stories of innovative teachers who have tried to find their own answers to some of these questions in the context of STEM curricula. Each of the case stories is independent of the others; they come from urban, rural, and remote areas, and from countries in the southern and northern hemisphere. The programs described in these case stories are linked together by the theme of curriculum integration involving at least one, but usually more, of the STEM subjects. All of these cases were part of a research program that began about 15 years ago, when we noticed an increasing interest in integrated curriculum, particularly at the middle school level. We noticed that many teachers were varying their science curriculum in ways they described as integrated. What did they hope to achieve by this? What did their integrated curriculum look like? What did it mean for the kinds of knowledge imparted to students, compared with the usual, subject-based curriculum? How would these kinds of knowledge prepare students to cope in the world outside of school? What could an integrated curriculum contribute to education for global citizenship? In the following section we describe how we tried to answer these questions.

Exploring Integrated Curriculum

Over the subsequent 15 years we have tried to address these and other questions about the nature and outcomes of integrated curricula (Rennie, Venville, & Wallace, 2011; Venville, Wallace, Rennie, & Malone, 2002). Perhaps not surprisingly, we found that teaching and learning are complex processes, made more so by the individuality of each teacher and his or her classroom. At the risk of simplifying these complexities, we suggest four generalizations about the nature and purpose of integration in the STEM curricula we examined.

The first generalization is that integrated curricula come in many shapes and forms. In all cases, however, there was an attempt to lead students to look outward toward the real world while drawing from the strengths of the subject disciplines. The second, and related, generalization is that when teaching higher grades, particularly, teachers had to put in considerable effort, in terms of both energy and time, to overcome the subject-centered structure of the school curriculum.

Our third generalization is that integration typically occurred within a context relating to the outside world and students’ personal experience. If we think of learning as making meaning, then this context is “the frame of reference that provides meaning” (Clark, 1997, p. 71). Making meaning requires the learner to make connections between things, by making patterns, organizing experiences, and creating “meaningful wholes.” As Clark (1997, p. 70) suggested, “an integrated curriculum begins with an assumption of the ‘connectedness of things,’” and further, that “an integrated curriculum is learner-centered.” This leads us to the fourth generalization: The degree of integration is related to the degree of learner-centeredness in the curriculum. We found that some curricula were primarily teacher-centered, but there were still important parts over which learners could exercise independence and control. Where this happened, learners were able to find ways of connecting local experience to a bigger, more global picture.

One issue related to curriculum integration is that of terminology. There is a range of terms used to describe integrated practice. For example, the term “integrated curriculum” is sometimes used interchangeably with “interdisciplinary curriculum.” Other words often used to describe integrated curricula include multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary. Clearly, all of these words refer to how disciplinary knowledge and skills are dealt with in an integrated curriculum. In this volume we use these terms in a way that is consistent with their general use:

Unidisciplinary describes a curriculum that draws from a single discipline.

Multidisciplinary programs draw from more than one discipline, each contributing to the topic of interest, but these disciplines remain separate.

Interdisciplinary curricula also draw from more than one discipline, but here the boundaries between these different disciplines become blurred or broken down as they are used to tackle a particular topic or theme.

Transdisciplinary curricula are fully integrated in that they draw from several disciplines, using the knowledge most appropriate to deal with the problem or issue at hand. The disciplines merge into each other, boundaries disappear, and the curriculum tends to be structured around the needs of the learner, rather than preserving the structure of the various disciplines.

The distinctions we make above have been used by some writers to create a continuum of curriculum integration, a kind of progression from less to more integrated. Drake (1993), for example, structured her three-framework continuum quite simply, taking the terms multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary as frameworks. Earlier, Jacobs (1989) used a five-part continuum, beginning with “parallel discipline designs,” where teachers of different subjects arranged to teach similar material in parallel so that there was reinforcement of the subject matter, but the subjects remained separate. Second was “complementary discipline units,” similar to the descriptions of multidisciplinary courses, followed by “interdisciplinary units/courses.” Both of these approaches maintained the structure of the disciplines in some measure. Jacobs’s “integrated day” described a theme-based program focused on students’ interests. The fifth kind of integration was described by Jacobs as a “complete program,” in which students determined their own curriculum according to their needs and interests.

It is easy to find continua like these and some even more complex (see, for example, Fogarty, 2002). What these curricula have in common is the naturally bounded school subjects as the starting point for curriculum organization, graduating into a curriculum in which the subject structures are broken down and the curriculum is organized around “real world” problems, issues, or projects of relevance to the learners.

These continua may be helpful in understanding how curriculum integration may vary, but we find them problematic. We find that the notion of continua implicitly suggests that moving along a continuum represents progress from a less desirable to a more desirable position; that more integration is better, for example. This approach is at odds with our research findings. Certainly there were different degrees to which subject boundaries were broken down and the curricula were more or less student-centered, but we found no inherent quality of “betterness.” Instead, we believe that the effectiveness of each curriculum must be judged according to its purpose. We agree with Hargreaves, Earl, and Ryan (1996), who pointed out that a continuum does not capture the complexity of integration. They recommended taking a pragmatic position that acknowledges and incorporates many different forms of integration. In our view, this position better reflects the broad spectrum of implemented curricula. To this end we have suggested an inclusive description of integrated curriculum as one that enables students to look toward multiple dimensions that reflect the realities of their experiences outside and inside school (Venville, Rennie, & Wallace, 2012).

Approaches to Integrating the Curriculum

Our research revealed a diversity of teachers’ efforts to integrate curricula, with many different approaches to integration. In describing the different approaches, we chose to use terms that teachers themselves used. Terms such as thematic and project-based provide information about how the curricula were structured, how they were implemented in the schools, and the relationship between subjects. Here, we describe six approaches to integration and illustrate them with examples, in the form of case stories, from our research program. Pseudonyms are used for all schools and teachers. The approaches are broadly sequenced in terms of whether the subjects are taught separately or together, but there is considerable overlap among them; none should be regarded as a “pure” form of curriculum integration. The order is one of convenience; no hierarchy is intended. The six approaches are synchronized, thematic, project-based, cross-curricular, school-specialized, and community-focused.

Synchronized Approach

Synchronized approaches are based on the identification of specific skills, knowledge, or understandings that are part of the content of more than one subject. These parts of the curriculum remain separately taught, although often at similar times, so that the presentation of content...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Exploring Curriculum Integration: Why Integrate?
• 2 Focus on Learning: Building Rockets and Submarines at Leaside High School
• 3 Focus on Problem-solving: Modeling an Ice Hockey Rink at Greenwich Public School
• 4 Focus on Engineering: Bridge Building at Southern High School
• 5 Focus on Literacy: Linking Language and Horticulture at Seaview Community School
• 6 Focus on Reinforcement: Exploring Electricity and Energy Use at Beachville High School
• 7 Focus on Focus: Making and Marketing a Toy at Rinkview Public School
• 8 Focus on Teacher Support: Considering Access for the Disabled at Gosport Community School
• 9 Focus on Leadership: Constructing a Model House at Mossburn School
• 10 Focus on Community: Learning About Tiger Snakes at Chelsea Elementary School
• 11 Focus on Values: Investigating Water Quality in a Local Lake at Kentish Middle School
• 12 Reflecting on Curriculum Integration: Seeking Balance and Connection Through a Worldly Perspective
• List of Contributors
• Index