A look at curriculum integration from the bridge

Abstract

This article looks at the popularity of curriculum integration in the 1990s in the United States. It offers evidence from national curriculum standards documents, books in print, journal articles, national coalitions and organizations, and curriculum in use to suggest that curriculum integration is experiencing a peak in interest, much like the early era of progressive education, and the open education movement of the 1960s. It further traces the intellectual roots of the current movement and looks at the conceptual differences in the two factions in the curriculum integration movement: the correlated/fused and the core. Different assumptions about the primary source of the curriculum lie at the heart of the split. An extensive reference section offers a sample of the writings on curriculum integration in the 1990s.

Implementing the democratic principles and practices of student‐centred curriculum integration in primary schools

“…Little consensus is evident on how it should occur or what it should look like, producing an abundance of theories, definitions and models (Hopkins 1937;Jacobs 1989;Fogarty 1991;Vars 1991;Beane 1997). Leading theorists attribute this confusion to a lack of historical understanding of curriculum integration's intellectual roots (Beane 1997;Vars 1997;Gehrke 1998). The integration movement can be traced back to the late nineteenth century in the USA where two distinct and mutually antagonistic factions developed subject-centred and student-centred CI (Dowden 2007(Dowden , 2011.…”

“…Interestingly, there is limited research or theorisation on subject-centred CI, perhaps because its traditional discipline structure presents little challenge to existing curriculum designs. Contemporary advocates of the multidisciplinary approach (Jacobs 1989;Fogarty 1991) have been criticised for presenting ahistorical perspectives which have resulted in inadequate theorisation (Wraga 1997;Gehrke 1998).…”

Do Mathematics and Reading Competencies Integrated into Career and Technical Education Courses Improve High School Student State Assessment Scores?

“…Thus, for over a century a debate has persisted between supporters of the concept of passive learning organized by disciplines and/or subjects, and experiential and social learning organized around themes, problems, and/or content (Beane, 1975.;Gehrke, 2006).…”

Learning science in an integrated classroom: Finding balance through theoretical triangulation

“…Gehrke (1998) remarked on the popularity of curriculum integration in the 1990s and demonstrated the increased number of publications devoted to the topic in the period 1990-1997 compared with the decades of the 1970s and the 1980s (see Gehrke 1998, tables 1 and 2). In their historical analysis of integrated curriculum during the last century, Berlin and Lee (2005) focused on science and mathematics.…”