Criticisms and Shortcomings of Interdisciplinary Teaching Methods
Scholars that advocate for curriculum integration argue that the topics studied should originate with students and their teachers, and not from district-imposed curriculum packages. This raises the important issue of accountability (Stevenson, 1998). As school districts often have decision-making panels that consist of stakeholders such as teachers, parents, and students, curriculum integration may take away their agency to make curricular choices. In addition to issues of local control, truly integrated curricula may or may not prepare students for the high-stakes tests that have become a reality for most high schools around the world, depending on whether they cover the same material. Finally, there is also concern that integrated teaching discounts the value of deep subject-specific knowledge, which is essential for specialization in areas such as medicine, law, and engineering (Gatewood, 1998).
Thematic units can also fall short of teaching in-depth content to students. Often a theme, such as apples, is used to link unrelated subjects, with little deference to students’ prior knowledge or interests. This superficial coverage of a topic can give students the wrong idea about school, perhaps missing the idea of curriculum integration in the first place (Barton & Smith, 2000). Thematic units can contain pointless busywork and activities created solely to create a link to a theme; for example, the alphabetizing of state capitals in a social studies unit, attempting to integrate it with language arts (Brophy & Alleman, 1991).
Read more about this topic: Interdisciplinary Teaching
Famous quotes containing the words criticisms, shortcomings, teaching and/or methods:
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.”
—Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881)
“Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds... Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that “usually rather.” Safe generalizations are quite boring.”
—Joseph Epstein (b. 1937)