Types of Interdisciplinary Teaching
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.
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