It's 7:23 a.m. in the Global Connections office of Reynoldsburg High School. Teachers of the 10th Grade Team begin their day. Dana Byrne (art): I can't get over yesterday. I've never seen high school students running down the hall, waving their evaluation sheets in the air, and yelling about how great they feel! Bob Wilson (biology): It shows that a performance-based project with an authentic audience is exciting for everybody. Steve Shapiro (social studies): Yes, how about that group of kids who taught a class about tropical rain forests? They really had to field some tough questions, ones that we didn't even think of during the dress rehearsals. Debbie Calhoun (algebra and geometry): Remember the group researching the zoning conflict? They presented a solution to the historical society and saw the parallels between the conflict in the Middle East and conflict in their own community. Barb Levak (English): But it couldn't have happened if we hadn't spent all that time helping the kids realize that global themes like conflict don't exist in isolation; in real life they happen across disciplines.
What does it mean to bring together the disciplines of mathematics, science, social studies, English, and art to teach high school students about the world? Why did these teachers decide to redesign their curriculum from a global perspective?
Helping Students Make Connections
Reynoldsburg, Ohio, is a small, diverse Midwestern city of 25,000. In our community, recognition has steadily been growing that schools need to prepare young people to make decisions in a world where ethnic diversity and global interconnections affect everyone. So, in the fall of 1990, the faculty of Reynoldsburg High School began examining alternatives for restructuring education.
Through the development of a new mission statement and the work of cross-disciplinary committees, we began to adopt the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools. We created Global Connections to develop an interdisciplinary approach to global education that would maintain academic integrity and empower young people to take an active role in shaping their world.
After reflecting on desired student outcomes, we began to conceptualize major curricular themes. For instance, we knew that we wanted our students to understand the ramifications of culture, both cultural universals and diverse cultural values (Kniep 1986). We particularly wanted them to recognize that people may interpret an event or issue in different ways—a concept called perspective consciousness (Case 1991, Hanvey 1976). Cross-cultural awareness, too, was an important ingredient of our approach. We wanted to develop both students' appreciation of diversity in the local community and their tolerance of cultural differences. Finally, our connections spanned time and space so that students would recognize their bond with people past and present (Anderson 1990, Kniep 1986).
A fundamental reason for blending the disciplines was to develop our students' abilities to think globally as they identify choices, reach judgments, and make decisions in their local community (Alger and Harf 1986, Becker 1979). We wanted them to understand the complex nature of global issues, such as conflict, and global systems, such as ecological systems (Alger and Harf 1986, Kniep 1986).
After much discussion, our instructional goals came together in three major units: culture, conflict, and interconnectedness with past civilizations and cultures today. As the central theme of the curriculum, culture provides a foundation for understanding peoples, issues, and systems. Before we examined cultures in other parts of the world, however, we wanted to immerse our students in a study of diverse local cultures. Conflict, our second theme, opens the door to many compelling local and global issues. Finally, interconnections with the past and today's cultures, helps students apply their understanding of culture and conflict to the study of change over time. This theme provides insights into how our own and other cultures have evolved.
Planning Global Issues Units
How did we move from these three large themes to unit planning? Our first unit provided students with a process for studying culture. As with all our units, we followed the Heidi Hayes Jacobs' (1989) interdisciplinary model and developed a set of questions that served as outcomes: What is culture? How is culture studied? How does culture change? While discussing these and other questions, we constructed the students' final assessment: case studies of the cultures of diverse high schools in the region.
Working in cooperative groups, our students researched and developed “cultural profiles” of eight very different high schools. The profiles included school demographics and students' heroes, gathering places, rites, and traditions. At the end of the first unit, we mailed the typed and illustrated cultural profiles of each school to the principals. They, in turn, sent their evaluations and critiques to our students.
The next step was to plan the scope and sequence of the unit. We outlined the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students need in order to study and document cultures. For example, in the area of knowledge, we introduced students to the elements of culture. Then they were to examine and compare the importance of critical balances and interrelationships in human and nonhuman cultures. In the area of skills, we brought in administrators and television and newspaper reporters to role-play interviewing techniques. For attitudes, we used the BaFa BaFa simulation (in which students develop and interact within two distinct cultures) to sensitize students to problems of one's own as well as others' prejudices in studying another culture.
- Wilson identified biology's ecosystems and classification systems as ways to define certain aspects of studying culture.
- Levak selected Lord of the Flies to help students understand how culture and governance develop and change.
- For the art component, Byrne chose murals to depict students' analyses of cultural aspects such as symbolism, ecosystems, characterizations, or conflicts found in the novel.
- From the social studies, Shapiro selected such concepts as ethnocentrism and cultural diversity.
- Calhoun, using the analogy that bridges are needed across cultures, had her geometry students examine shapes and structures in the construction of famous world bridges. Students then applied this knowledge by constructing models, leading to a full-size rope bridge in the school courtyard.
Together, we brainstormed and selected concepts and teaching strategies from our own disciplines to complement the goals of the unit. Part of our process was to learn about one another's educational philosophies, teaching styles, disciplines, and to share our knowledge of globally oriented content.
From our first unit, we learned that planning and implementing a global interdisciplinary curriculum is dynamic and ever-evolving. Each day we shared two planning periods (one for group planning and one for individual work) and four instructional periods, which could be structured to meet our specific needs. During our daily planning time, we fine-tuned our overall unit planning and dealt with the coordination and logistics of the major assessments. We tried to hold Fridays open for discussions of curricular issues and discipline-based concerns. Flexibility was a critical factor in our work both as individuals and as a team.
In developing our major units on conflict and global history, we found that the characteristics of our students, opportunities for connections with the local community, and current events helped us to improve our curricular decisions. Our broad conceptualization of Global Connections allowed us to take advantage of students' interest in the Olympics and to tie in with the local event of Ameriflora (an international floral exhibit in Columbus) and its controversy connected with the Columbus Quincentenary.
Sharing What We Learned
During the second year of Global Connections, we came to several fundamental understandings. First, a global approach to instruction calls for increased teacher learning. Because we hadn't studied global or international content in our own schooling, we had to learn new content. In exploring alternatives for how to organize our interdisciplinary program, we discovered the global dimensions of our own subjects and those of our teammates, as well as how and when to connect content across the disciplines.
Second, we recognized the importance of an overall curriculum theme and plan. During the summer planning sessions, we developed a yearlong curriculum map to coordinate the disciplines. To avoid creating an ad hoc curriculum of “What are we going to do next?”, we shared the most important knowledge, skills, and attitudes of our disciplines. Each of us had to take a hard, sometimes painful look at our subjects in order to prioritize the essential components. Working from this written framework, we then generated interdisciplinary connections. A curriculum map and a guiding theme are critical elements of an interdisciplinary program.
Third, by December we had learned that there are alterative approaches to working across disciplines. Flexibility in working together allowed us to maintain the integrity of each subject instead of forcing connections to the point of diminishing returns. We experimented with two modes of planning. In parallel planning, we selected a common theme and then made connections to the theme independently of one another. For example, during the study of our interconnectedness with the past, the English classes read Homer's Odyssey, math classes studied the Golden Rectangle, social studies classes learned about emerging democracies, biology classes studied past contributions to anatomy and physiology, and art focused on the historical antecedents of today's architecture.
Multidisciplinary planning is the interweaving of two or three disciplines. In the same unit on historical interconnections, students wrote one research paper for social studies and English. Levak and Shapiro worked together on the research and writing processes as students wrote comparative papers that answered the question, “How did Ancient Greece influence the modern world?” From these experiences, we've learned that parallel and multidisciplinary units complement interdisciplinary ones by helping students to make connections in the world around them.
Other lessons are the familiar ones we've all read about in the literature on school and curricular change. As individuals, we are committed to the team and the process of planning and teaching together. We have been fortunate to be able to develop Global Connections with administrators and in a school climate that supported us and the change process. We were given flexibility in scheduling to plan interdisciplinary learning and extracurricular activities. From the start, we worked closely with parents and the community—people and resources critical to our success.
This is not to say that Global Connections has not had its occasional problems. At times we've had to modify our expectations, strategies, and roles. We've never wavered in our commitment, however. As teachers, we have been invigorated by learning to be generalists and to practice the cooperative learning that we teach. In addition, our students tell us that Global Connections has brought new meanings to their lives. For once, schoolwork relates to their out-of-school learning and experiences. They now see themselves as part of a larger world, where their lives touch and are touched by the myriad lives of others.
