Friday 24 June 2016

Week 31 APC Professional Context Activity 7: Crossing Boundaries and Making Connections.


A Mindmap showing my current and potential interdisciplinary connections. 





Identify two of the potential connections from your map as your near future goal(s). 

The first potential connection that I have chosen is Digital Technology. The second is Numeracy. Both of these connections are related to the progress that is being made with regards to Primary Industry and at moderation days, students low numeracy skills are always a key concern highlighted by employers. The use of technology, for example, the use of agricultural drones, computer programs to identify optimum crop production techniques and weather predicting tools, are becoming essential to building a profitable and sustainable business in Agriculture. If I teach Agriculture as I discrete subject then I am doing a disservice to my students as in the real-world they will need to make use of technology and relate more than one branch of knowledge to be able to work and run a business successfully. 
The second choice, Mathematics, has been chosen because many of my students struggle in the area of Mathematics and by trying to develop a interdisciplinary program of study it will enable students to see the relevance of Mathematics, for example, our students needs to be able to measure out correct quantities of chemicals such as fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides as well as gain the Mathematics skills they will need for their future lives. Failure to have some basis math skills puts them at a disadvantage within the industry. Students are expected to gain 10 NCEA Numeracy credits to pass Level 1 and this could be an opportunity to see the relevancy of gaining these credits as well as improving their critical thinking skills by offering them meaningful learning in real-life problem solving projects. I do a little of this already, students have to measure out and apply the correct amount of fertilizer to their garden, the paperwork from this is passed onto the maths teacher. They are able to use this as evidence towards the students numeracy credits.

Critically discuss the benefits and challenges of working in a more interdisciplinary environment.
(Source: https://ideastoimplement.wordpress.com/integrating-the-curriculum/)

The interdisciplinary approach has been defined by Executive Director of the Association for Integrated Studies William H. Newell and William Green (1982) as “inquiries which critically draw upon two or more disciplines and which lead to an integration of disciplinary insights” (Haynes, 2002). Some of the advantages of this approach is that we are able to bring different disciplines and ideas together which gives students a better understanding of how knowledge naturally exists in the real-world. At secondary schools, the normal has usually been to teach in distinct subject areas or silos. I believe this limits the students 'all round' understanding of a subject and also limits the development of higher thinking skills. By using a interdisciplinary approach, teachers and students are exposed to and gain experience of how their subject knowledge is related to other subject knowledge and how is it applied in context to real-life situation. It also gives them the opportunity to look at the same question or project from multiply perspectives, rather than just a narrow discrete individual subject view. This approach also requires teacher and students to work in teams towards a common goal. All of these experiences improves understanding and development of communications, collaboration and leadership skills by again allowing teachers and students to work in a authentic learning environment. Overall, all learners are allowed to experience, experiment and develop life-long learning skills which more closely resembles what they will experience in the real-world.
Some of the disadvantages of using the interdisciplinary teaching approach is that it can be very time consuming to develop a suitable program and difficult for teachers to get together to work on the planning in an already busy work schedule. One of the problems that I can see within my own school is that student choose different option lines or are split into different Math groups. This would mean that students who chose to do Agriculture may not all be in the same Math class. The logistic of this could make it difficult to implement the program but it is not impossible, just thought would need to go into how we could get around this issue. Maybe a whole school timetable solution? I think another issue, or disadvantage may be that some teachers are not keen to collaborate and often they are very protective with keeping their subject area as a discrete subject. I think you would need to pick your collaboration groups very carefully as if the workload was not shared fairly this could also cause some friction between teachers and limit the effectiveness of the program.




(Source:http://slideplayer.com/slide/269380/)

References




Hayes, C. (2002. Innovations in Interdisciplinary Teaching, West port, CT, American Council on Education ORYN Press.

Jones, C.(2009). Interdisciplinary approach - Advantages, disadvantages, and the future benefits of interdisciplinary studies. ESSAI, 7(26), 76-81. 

Lacoe Edu (2014, Oct 24) Interdisciplinary Learning [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA564RIlhME

Mathison,S.. & Freeman, M.(1997). The logic of interdisciplinary studies. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, 1997. 

TEDx Talks (2001, April 6). TEDxBYU - David Wiley - An Interdisciplinary Path to Innovation. [video file].Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ytjMDongp4







7 comments:

  1. Hi Alison. It is staggering how students aren't often able to transfer skills from one subject to another. I too find my chemistry and science students are completely baffled by maths that I throw at them yet would be comfortable with in a maths class. The silos we create can be quite detrimental.
    I am sick of seeing Year 13s type something times 10 into their calculators!
    Cheers,
    Paul

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    1. your words are so true, I think by teaching such distinct subject groups students don't seem to be able to 'switch heads' as easily. In a way it is setting them up for failure as they are not able to deal with real-life situations as well and think critically and apply knowledge across the board from one area of expertise to another. I think it is more difficult to change and breakdown the silos in secondary school but having said that I think it is possible and it is going to take people like us to lead the way and for use to try to work with other like-minded people to move things forward in this direction.

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  2. Hi Alison. I'm a Primary Teacher, and I too have the same issues as you and Paul above. You might have a great reader in the class, but when you open up a maths text book - for some reason - they can't seem to understand what it is saying. So, the problem starts young. I teach in a small rural community, predominantly dairy farmers and sheep and beef. I agree with you, they do need to learn stuff in their own context - knowing about agricultural drones and measuring out correct quantities is all part of our context too. And I also agree with you - it is all very time consuming. As for collaboration groups - you are always going to get those teachers who piggy-back onto others aye. And from my experience, you will also find that it is those same teachers who don't implement integration particularly well, which kind of lets the team down, so to speak.

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    1. Hi Sue, thank you for commenting on my blog. It sounds like your students are having fun learning information that is relevant to their and their families lives. I find it makes such a difference to the students motivation and interest. I am really looking forward to listening to what my students want and taking on board their interests and trying to set up programs that tend to their interest whilst at the same time giving them opportunities to improve key skills and delve into a mixture of key subject knowledge from other subjects and not just the subject area I am in charge of. I totally get what you are saying about collaboration, it is really difficult sometimes trying to collaborate with other teachers who are not keen to share 'their' subject or don't see the point of breaking down subject silos. But I believe things will change and all we can do is keep pushing through and keep talking and sharing ideas with each other. I wonder where you are based? Kind regards Alison

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  3. Hi all, its been interesting reading your points of view about how students learn one discipline (silo) better than others. In your last post Alison you mentioned how your'e looking forward to listening to what your students want and take on board their interest. I think you have hit the nail on the head. Professor Russell Bishops latest work on Relationship-based learning is all about the teacher knowing their learners and their learning. Developing your planning to meet their interests, prior knowledge, skill-base, etc will give them the opportunity to build on their current learning, and motivate new learning through inquiry. collaboration is an excellent tool to share good practice, ideas, planning and more, and it doesn't really matter how much or little one puts into it or gives as long as it is worthwhile or contributes well to the discussion, etc. Yes I agree that there are some teachers that will sit back and let others do all the work, we get that with our Principal groups too. Keep on pushing on.

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    1. Hi Rosina, Thank you for commenting on my blog. It has been an amazing learning journey and I am really looking forward to having time to work of some of my programs to better suit my learners. One of the problems I have found is that it is more difficult to give students as much choice with their learning within the senior sector and the fact we have to 'teach to the test' with regards to some of the NZQA assessments. It does restrict things slightly but hopefully with all the new learning I will be able to find ways around this and give students a program that meets their needs more.

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  4. I find if I talk daily about subjects being interrelated, it begins to seep into the brains of some children. I often use "out-of-school" example, for instance I talk about an art technique that has relied on aspects of technology like CGI in film or I might talk about science and medicine together, for instance medical advances that have come from tarantula venom. I try to use things that the children would be interested / fascinated in that they may not have heard about before. The Y5 children I teach would not read the same newspaper articles or science magazines I read, and yet once out into childspeak, they are immediately interested.

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