Interdisciplinary teaching

Interdisciplinary teaching is a method, or set of methods, used to teach a unit across different curricular disciplines. For example, the seventh grade Language Arts, Science and Social Studies teachers might work together to form an interdisciplinary unit on rivers.

The local river system would be the unifying idea, but the English teacher would link it to Language Arts by studying river vocabulary and teaching students how to do a research report. The science teacher might teach children about the life systems that exist in the river, while the Social Studies teacher might help students research the local history and peoples who used the river for food and transport.

There are many different types, or levels, of interdisciplinary teaching. On one end, schools might employ an interdisciplinary team approach, in which teachers of different content areas assigned to one group of students who are encouraged to correlate some of their teaching (Vars, 1991). The most common method of implementing integrated, interdisciplinary instruction is the thematic unit, in which a common theme is studied in more than one content area (Barton & Smith, 2000).

The example given above about rivers would be considered multidisciplinary or parallel design, which is defined as lessons or units developed across many disciplines with a common organizing topic (Jackson & Davis, 2000).

One of the foremost scholars of interdisciplinary teaching techniques is James Beane, who advocates for curriculum integration, which is curriculum that is collaboratively designed around important issues. It has four major components: the integration of experiences, social integration, the integration of knowledge, and integration as a curriculum design. It differs from other types of interdisciplinary teaching in that it begins with a central theme that emerges from questions or social concerns students have, without regard to subject delineations (Beane, 1997).

In 1989, the seminal work, Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Design and Implementation, edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs was published by ASCD (Alexandria, Va). In this work, she presented a continuum of options for design spanning focused disciplined work to parallel to multidisciplinary to full integration.

A school district in Michigan created integration plans for thematic units, based on the ideas of Howard Gardner about multiple intelligences, in a yearlong pilot program. The results of the program included “sustained enthusiasm” from the staff, parents, and students, increased attendance rates, and improvement in standardized test scores, “especially from students with the poorest test results” (Bolak, Bialach, & Duhnphy, 2005).

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