Curriculum Integration Reflection

Curriculum Integration
Author(s): J. A. Gibbons
Source: Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Winter, 1979), pp. 321-332
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education/University of Toronto
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/

The integration the article is concerned with is "the transformation of knowledge." Transforming it into something more than its original form. The one thing this article talked about, aside from the difficulty of accurately defining curriculum integration and the difficulty of actually doing it, is that interpretation is needed. That word, right now, comes up a lot in education. A teacher's interpretation of the curriculum, how to integrate it, how to integrate real-world problems/scenarios into it, how to integrate technology into it, all without losing the original intent and goal of the lesson. And teaching the students to interpret - lessons, data, how to find what's missing and read between the lines to come up with viable conclusions/solutions.

Modifying the curriculum is big, too, in education, to allow for better integration. Right now, RTI, or Response to Intervention, is all about identifying the differences in learning styles of students and modifying the curriculum to meet the needs of those students. And I agree, that in order to integrate, modification is needed. Look at relationships and marriage, and to some level, simply meeting another person. Modifications in behavior, attitude, speech, etc., are made internally and externally to find common ground and interaction. It is how much modification to make that is debated.

It was hypothesized in the article that curriculum integration "hangs on the meaning of the phrase 'hanging on to complex connections between different domains.'" (Pring, 146) Someone, perhaps a district manager, or teacher, or committee, has to discover the complex connections between two subject areas, and identify what can be modified to integrate them successfully. And quite often, as in the "whole language" teaching approach, it seems very much that education is used more for experimentation than discovering real integration, and that there are no answers to the nature of the concepts and propositions questions posed in the article.

I found that the hypothesis that integration/modification can only take place between two things at once intriguing. Going back to relationships, If you have 3 or more people in a group, I suppose this is still true. Modification still only takes place one-on-one, even if that one-to-one switches between people of the group quickly. I guess that's why educators talk about integration of technology and curriculum, as a separate topic from integrating curriculum subjects with each other.