Integrating Curriculum

Integrating curriculum between different classes can be a very important thing that many teachers do not currently do. How many times do students leave an English classroom without making the connection between that books that they are reading and the time period in History. Depending on what period in time a piece of literature was written can determine what was being written about, who was writing the piece, etc. During the Civil Rights Movement there were a lot of poems, books, and speeches being written by civil rights activists; such as: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Maya Angelou. They cared about the position that their people were in and were working to make the mass population realize that things needed to be changed. However, a lot of these ideas are lost between the different classes of History and English because of the teacher not explicitly making the direct link between what was being read, the time period, the authors, and what the authors' goals were.

Why does integrating the curriculum not happen often, especially between classes such as History, English, Foreign Language, etc? Most likely a big problem is that teachers need to make themselves more prepared in order to handle the questions that are going to arise in the content area that they normally do not teach. The English teacher will not only have to become an expert on the literature, such as:Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry; but they will also have to do a lot of background research into the Industrial Period and the effect that the Industrial Period had on people. This also means that teachers from different content areas will have to work more closely together in order to coordinate their curriculums'. For example, if the History teacher is working on a certain period in time, then the English teacher will not want to stray to far away from the History teacher when the History teacher moves on in time; by spending too much time reading a certain book or play.

Do the benefits out way the drawbacks? There is not much research done into integrating curriculum because this has not been done on a wide scale. However, there are some teachers that try to integrate curriculum because they see how much of a benefit integration can be. Since teachers build on a similar foundation of basic ideas, students are more readily able to remember the new content that they are taught because of the links back to their prior knowledge. Integration is also beneficial because the reiteration of similar and or the same ideas helps students remember what they are learning. Lastly, many students are not able to make the connections between different content areas without the teachers help. For some reason, when students move from class to class, they think that the content being taught is isolated and abstract from all other knowledge that they are learning and have already learned. If only students understood how much information they learn comes from many of the same foundamental and basic ideas that they have known for ages!