  
What
is Curriculum Integration?
Curriculum Integration connects
academics across disciplines and often with technical/career
content, incorporating standards, real world problems
and applications, and the individual student needs
and interests. Kathy Lake, in her article on Integrated
Curriculum for the School Improvement Research
Series, Northwest Regional Educational
Laboratory, provides the following background
information.
Shoemaker
(Shoemaker, B. "Integrative Education:
A Curriculum for the Twenty-First Century."
Oregon School Study Council 33/2, 1989) defines
an integrated curriculum as
...education
that is organized in such a way that it cuts
across subject-matter lines, bringing together
various aspects of the curriculum into meaningful
association to focus upon broad areas of study.
It views learning and teaching in a holistic
way and reflects the real world, which is
interactive. (1989)
Other
terms used include interdisciplinary teaching,
thematic teaching, and synergistic teaching. All
these terms…refer to an educational approach
that prepares children for lifelong learning.
There is a strong belief among those who support
curriculum integration that schools must look
at education as a process for developing abilities
required by life in the twenty-first century,
rather than discrete, departmentalized subject
matter. In general, all of the definitions of
integrated curriculum or interdisciplinary curriculum
include:
- a
combination of subjects
- an
emphasis on projects
- sources
that go beyond textbooks
- relationships
among concepts
- thematic
units as organizing principles
- flexible
schedules
- flexible
student groupings
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