AND THE TECHNOLOGY LEARNING AREA |
In an era of intense curriculum contestation, the idea of integrating the curriculum, across both subject and learning areas, seems an obvious and sensible approach to curriculum development and planning. This approach helps students and teachers to make links between subjects and/or learning areas within a formal setting, avoids unnecessary curriculum overlap, and strengthens student learning by allowing them to arrive at knowledge and understanding from a variety of different perspectives.
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An integrated approach is typically taken in the primary school and entails the development of themes, topics or questions of interest to the students themselves. For example, in a unit about "snacks’, students might investigate the nutritional value of snacks, examine the snacks of various ethnic groups, visit a food industry processing plant that makes snacks, examine how snack foods are transported across Australia (the world), visit an advertising agency that makes TV advertisements for snack foods, write poems to promote healthy snacks, prepare snack foods for their families, make posters of snacks in other countries with the names written in the local language and examine their own snacking habits. In this way students would have integrated learnings from a range of learning areas - for example, health and physical education, studies of society and environment, English, LOTE and the arts.
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Current curriculum practice demands that students should be assisted to attain certain outcomes in the various learning areas or subjects that make up the curriculum. Whilst an integrated approach in the primary school can address these outcomes, for many teachers in secondary schools, this approach is confounded by the timetable being carved up into discrete subject and/or learning area time allocations. Another approach is a multi-disciplinary approach which continues to use the idea of themes or topics, but acknowledges that the topic crosses a variety of subject areas, In this multi-disciplinary approach, a group of teachers from a variety of different subject or leaning areas may develop a theme or topic which ranges across their subjects, specialist interest areas or learning areas. In the example used above, the secondary teachers of home economics, social studies, LOTE, and English would work simultaneously on a topic called "snacking" but all taking different perspectives. | |
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A further approach is a cross-learning area approach within any one subject. For example, a home economics teacher might develop the theme 'Advertising, body image and food habits' which could involve students working towards outcomes from the following learning areas: technology; health and physical education; and studies of society and environment.
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