Interdisciplinary/Cross-Curricular Teaching

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

Interdisciplinary, or cross-curricular, teaching represents a major reconsideration of how material should be presented in a classroom. Most often applied in the primary education levels, the interdisciplinary teaching model challenges instructors to draw from different disciplines to present new ideas more holistically, applying different disciplines and their assumptions about the learning process and the value of learning to the same classroom experience or unit or activity. Thus, students learn contextually and see how the sciences and the arts, traditionally kept discrete disciplines in education, are actually interconnected and can work together to enhance a classroom and make education exciting and engaging.

Overview

The theoretical foundation behind interdisciplinary teaching is deceptively simple. A child does not, in fact cannot learn, in discrete disciplines. When, for example, a child hears a song, her body responds to the mathematics of the beat, her ear responds to the delightful word patterns and rhymes, her vocabulary skills are enhanced learning the words, her physical coordination is engaged when she responds by moving her body rhythmically, her brain is enlisted ultimately to remember the experience. Learning any single fact is done necessarily holistically by a child.

The traditional classroom, however, is organized around carefully segmented disciplines, with arts and sciences, for example, kept apart as a strategy for ensuring that a child masters skills and a discrete body of knowledge for each field of study. Such balkanization of education has long been considered the logical way to learn in depth the basics of any field. Concentration of subject matter is thought to encourage children to discover their particular aptitude as a way to direct their eventual professional career—a love of numbers foretells a life as a banker or accountant, for example.

To master the basics according to the traditional model, the child would go from one discipline to another, often actually moving into a different room. Each room setup defined the discipline: the English classroom decorated with poems and definitions of words and important quotes; the science class with its beakers and broad black-top lab tables and the periodic table; math with its slide rulers and calculators; the foreign language room with travel posters and the clothing and artifacts of that culture. Critics assert that teachers using this method inevitably became territorial and protective of their own discipline and tended to downplay the value and import of what were perceived to be competing disciplines. The arts and the sciences were seen to be engaging in a kind of simmering Hatfield and McCoy feud.

Breaking with Traditional Boundaries. Education theorists cite four principal cultural events in the second half of the twentieth century that largely reshaped this traditional perception of education and encouraged integrating disciplines rather than keeping them separate and neat.

The horrific experience of World War II encouraged a generation of education theorists as early as the 1940s to argue that division and separation of disciplines did not enable children to learn productively. Rather, boundaries and partitions created adults who thought narrowly and could not approach, much less solve, significant problems. In real time, in the real world, no problem facing a business, for example, could be resolved by the simple and absolute application of a single discipline’s knowledge.

Second, a school of theory, which came to be known as constructivism, began to explore how knowledge—that is, the raw information a classroom must impart to students—is actually built, or constructed. A far more sophisticated understanding of children and of play itself emerged. Child psychologists argued that a child engaged in what is apparently a simple game or uncomplicated play activity was in fact undergoing an intense and very complex processing of a variety of data points, none of which could be isolated from the others. Learning was found to be contextual.

Third, beginning in the 1950s, the burgeoning environmental studies field revealed the interconnected structure of ecosystems. Each individual ecosystem—a pond, a delta, a rain forest, a desert—was discovered to be an intricate cooperative system where apparently discrete elements, flora and faunas, climate and weather, all worked together to sustain the system. The model was easily transferable to other natural systems, including learning.

Fourth, in the latter decades of the twentieth century, digital technology recreated a global communication network that did not recognize boundaries and borders. The worldwide web was a dramatic illustration of the interconnectedness of disciplines.

In each case, theorists in radically different fields all came to same conclusion: Linkage is everything. Boundaries in education are being collapsed, with interdisciplinary teaching bridging fields with cross linkages (Spintzyk, Strehlke, Ohlberger, Gröben & Wegner, 2016). Traditional education models had long placed the teacher at the center of the teaching process. By shifting the process to account for how a child actually learns, rather than depending on mere presentation of information, more progressive teachers began to appreciate the dimensions of early education, the depth of the process by which a child comes to grasp a new fact. An art teacher is able to apply the instruction of colors and their integrity to physics; a math teacher showing the complicated protocol of long division can show how the principle operates in biology; a social studies teacher can use the war poetry of Walt Whitman to clarify the impact of the American Civil War.

Increasingly, research into neurobiology has suggested that the brain itself learns through interdisciplinary techniques, taking in new data and applying it to data already mastered without regard into which school subject the new data fell. The traditional concept of boundary education—that is, the hard and absolute separation of the arts and sciences—began to feel antiquated and dysfunctional among teachers born after 1970. Introducing interdisciplinary instruction, either through team teaching or by encouraging instructors in one discipline to master the basics of another discipline, has led to a robust discussion about how a classroom is to operate, how authority in a teacher is to be defined and preserved, the actual and specific role and responsibilities of a young student, and ultimately questions about how well an education prepares a student for success in an increasingly connected world. Education is intended to prepare an adult to apply knowledge to investigate and ultimately solve problems both in their professional lives and in their personal lives.

Applications

The fundamental curriculum for primary education has traditionally stressed ten basic distinct and discrete disciplines: the sciences; computer literacy; mathematics; English (writing and reading); foreign language; art; music, physical education; social studies (history and government); and geography.

In its most basic application, cross-curricular instruction would bring together disciplines that have a clear and apparent link—for example, math and the sciences, with their grounding in data and the interpretation of numbers into patterns that can, in turn, be shaped into the fundamental laws governing matter and energy. English, which emphasizes managing words into sentences and developing both reading and listening skills, could easily be introduced into a foreign language unit on grammar or sentence construction or recitations. Understanding the principles of a major art movement could be expanded by introducing the music composed in the same era. Historical investigation of the implosion of nation-states that triggered World War I could be helped immensely by a basic grasp of the nature of the European continent itself and how geography helped shape critical alliances. By defining informational patterns between the disciplines, educators give students a far more flexible model for understanding the world. This approach better prepares students to work with a number of skills and proficiencies that draw from previously discrete subject areas.

Crossdisciplinarity calls for one or several disciplines to support another discipline (Jankvist, 2011). Interdisciplinary teaching models work to bring together disciplines that have long been seen as oppositional and even antagonistic (Bosserman, 1994). Less than a generation ago, the stereotypes that defined students, science nerds and English geeks, for example, kept the disciplines absolutely apart.

Within cross-curricular teaching, the science teacher recognizes how scientific progress routinely relies on basic listening and speaking skills, how any discovery relies ultimately on being transcribed into language, and that basic observational research relied on establishing an ordered system for recording and interpreting data and in turn sharing those findings with interested others. The English teacher realizes that language is at its base a way of engaging and observing the world and then taking careful and rigorous notes of such phenomena, translating those observations into words. As Christou & Bullock noted in a 2014 study on how social sciences and science teachers can collaborate, “Both disciplines depend on a community of scholars to review and to potentially falsify claims to knowledge; both are intimately related to such concepts as worldview, heritage, memory, citizenship, nationhood, and community.”

Dialogic Learning. The possibilities for pedagogy then open up. The biology teacher, for example, can use cross-curricular teaching in a unit on seeds by having students record their planting experiment and keep a careful diary trracking seedling development and then presenting those findings to the class (Brodie & Thompson, 2009). The English teacher can discuss the basic elements of an ecosystem to introduce the basic tenets of Transcendentalism and the basic argument of botany to understand the metaphors of Thoreau and Whitman. Music teachers can use algorithms, physical education teachers, music. The scientific method can be used to approach the interpretation of a poem or to speculate about motivation in a fictional character. The applications are as intricate and as suggestive as the creativity and ingenuity of the teacher allow.

By linking academic disciplines in meaningful ways, teachers create students who are more flexible in their understanding of the world and, in turn, feel less structured in their education. The concept, known as dialogic learning, encourages students to participate in their education by raising questions that, class to class, discipline to discipline, begin to reveal a shared pattern of responses. “Indeed dialog has emerged in several philosophical works as a way of establishing community, defining selves, fostering empathy, and building relationships” (Thompson & Kleine, 2015). In that way, in each class, knowledge is actually constructed, built within the classroom with the help of the students and the direction of the teacher. “As students engage using collaborative interdisciplinary approaches, they show improved motivation for novel problems, strengthen their own disciplinary skill sets, and learn the practice of cross-disciplinary communication” (Jolley & Ayala, 2015).

Cross-curricular teaching demands far more from the teacher than the traditional model. Lessons need to be more broadly planned; indeed, the teacher must be willing to extend themselves beyond the narrow range of their expertise. Although within one approach to cross-curricular teaching, instructors actually team teach and present their expertise as a separate element of the classroom unit or activity, research studies have shown that team teaching is not as effective as a single teacher maintaining the authority and command of the traditional classroom. Indeed, bringing in two teachers can reinforce the sense of separation between and among the disciplines.

Viewpoints

Those grounded in the traditional separation of disciplines are wary of interdisciplinary teaching strategies. They argue that by giving students a little bit of sciences in the arts and little bit of arts in the sciences, by giving the math students a little bit of music and gym class a little bit of history, the skills those disciplines are designed to teach get fragmented. Students never actually learn any one discipline completely and are given a more superficial understanding of disciplines that before had been taught with better focus. If the units and/or classes are poorly planned or poorly executed, students can be distracted, even confused by the overload of information. In addition, by fragmenting discipline presentation, teachers the following year are never entirely sure what elements of the curriculum the student has been able to master. Ineffectively practiced, links can be drawn that are more clever and cute than they are real and helpful.

Perhaps the keenest objection raised by traditional educators is the burden cross-curricular teaching places on the teacher. When a school district or a school adopts the theoretical model, the expectations for broader educator expertise falls entirely on teachers. A veteran teacher who has taught algebra for twenty years must suddenly create ways to introduce history or music or science into the classroom presentation. The stress can lead to frustration or worse half-hearted efforts. Further, cross curricular teaching cannot work if only a single teacher or single discipline in the school uses the approach.

Advocates of cross-curricular teaching, however, stress interdisciplinary professional development as a benefit—teachers themselves are renewed, their perception of knowledge and learning expanded. Lesson plans become more creative and, ultimately, more engaging. Students begin to see relationships between disciplines and how a skill set, called a tool box, from one field can be used and applied profitably in another field. The school day becomes a continuum of knowledge rather than individual periods or classes (St. Clair & Kishimoto, 2010). Finally, students learn not to be intimidated by a particular subject because no artificial taxonomy sets dull or difficult subjects apart, in isolation from those a student may find easier or more interesting and relevant.

Terms and Concepts

Balkanization: A method, most often considered counterproductive, of separating material and/or ideas that share more than they differ.

Boundary Education: Traditional education theory that held the disciplines are best imparted to students by keeping them apart.

Constructivism: An education theory that examines how information is built through the shared participation of both the instructor and the students.

Dialogic Learning: A classroom pedagogy in which the teacher and the students create information through a largely unstructured question and answer process.

Discrete: Kept deliberately and carefully apart.

Platform: In computer technology, the digital space wherein a combination of related information can be coordinated, organized, preserved, and shared.

Team Teaching: A cross-curricular teaching method used to expand the presentation of class material by having two (or more) instructors, most often from different disciplines or areas of expertise, actually conduct the class during a single class period, unit, or semester.

Toolbox: A way to describe the sum of competencies and skills defined and expected within a particular school or curriculum.

Bibliography

Bosserman, N. (1994). The business of cross curricular teaching. California English, 30(4), 8–9. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=31746427&site=ehost-live

Brodie, E., & Thompson, M. (2009). Double crossed: Exploring science and history through cross-curricular teaching. School Science Review, 90(332), 47–52. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=37016441&site=ehost-live

Christou, T. & Bullock, S. (2014). Learning and teaching about social studies and science: A collaborative self-study. Social Studies, 105(2), 80–90. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=93677812&site=ehost-live

Jankvist, U. (2011). The construct of anchoring: An idea for “measuring” interdisciplinarity in teaching. Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal, 26, 1–10. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=95769696&site=ehost-live

Jolley, A., & Ayala, G. (2015). “Living with volcanoes”: Cross-curricular teaching in the high school classroom. Journal of Geoscience Education, 63(4), 297–309. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=112135611&site=ehost-live

Spintzyk, K., Strehlke, F. F., Ohlberger, S., Gröben, B., & Wegner, C. (2016). An empirical study investigating interdisciplinary teaching of biology and physical education. Science Educator, 25(1), 35–42. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=117365975&site=ehost-live

St. Clair, D., & Kishimoto, K. (2010). Decolonizing teaching. Multicultural Education, 18(1), 18–24. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=508189577&site=ehost-live

Thompson, C., & Kleine, M. (2015). An interdisciplinary dialog about teaching and learning dialogically. Innovative Higher Education, 40(1), 73–85. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=101557134&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Adams, D., & Hamm, M. (2015). Imagine, inquire, and create: A STEM-inspired approach to cross-curricular teaching. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Avramides, K. K., Hunter, J., Oliver, M., & Luckin, R. (2015). A method for teacher inquiry in cross-curricular projects: Lessons from a case study. British Journal of Educational Technology, 46(2), 249–264. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=101622042&site=ehost-live

Harrison, R., et al. (2011). Cross-curricular teaching and learning in the secondary school. New York, NY: Routledge.

Kerry, T. (2015). Cross-curricular teaching in the primary school: Planning and facilitating imaginative lessons. 2nd. ed. New York, NY: Routledge.

Lo, Y. Y. (2015). A glimpse into the effectiveness of L2-content cross-curricular collaboration in content-based instruction programmes. International Journal of Bilingual Education & Bilingualism, 18(4), 443–462. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=102665047&site=ehost-live

Sabitzer, B. B. (2013). Informatics meets foreign languages COOL ideas for a cross-curricular cooperation. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(2), 424-432. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=84645537&site=ehost-live