When we consider the purpose of education, many of us who work in schools believe our most important job is to nurture students to be active and engaged participants in our democratic society, and ultimately to help make our world more fair, just, and equitable. This underlying sense of mission has taken on an even greater urgency in light of growing signs of intolerance and hatred in our country, such as the recent white nationalist marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, and elsewhere.
But when we stop to consider the skills and attributes students will need to strengthen our democracy over the next generation, our task can feel overwhelming. To form an opinion about the Dakota Pipeline project, for example, citizens need to have a historical perspective on the dispossession of indigenous people, a scientific understanding of the costs and benefits of different energy resources, the ability to evaluate the risks of pollution to a water supply, and an economic understanding of the impact of domestic infrastructure projects on jobs.
The skills and knowledge students must acquire to engage in our democracy are rarely confined to a single discipline. But as standards and standards-based assessment in the “core” academic disciplines have grown more robust and specific, content and skills within these heavily tested subject areas have become increasingly isolated. Even in elementary schools, where thematic units across disciplines were once relatively common in self-contained classrooms, educators today are less likely to stray from content-specific pacing guides. There is simply too much to cover.
For example, many 4th grade teachers in my state, Massachusetts, are expected to cover the extraordinarily broad topic of the “geography and people” of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. That includes such eclectic objectives as “On a map of North and South America, locate the Isthmus of Panama that divides North from South America”; “Describe the climate, major physical characteristics, and major natural resources of Canada and explain their relationship to settlement, trade, and the Canadian economy”; and “Identify major monuments and historical sites in and around Washington, D.C.” With so many bits and pieces of content, it can be hard to organize instruction into lessons that matter, that connect students to larger questions about themselves and the world.
Creating a Curriculum that Sticks
When my district—Cambridge—began implementing the Next Generation Science Standards in 2015–2016, concerns about content isolation became pronounced. As part of the gradual roll-out process, 4th grade teachers from a few schools in our district volunteered to serve as “pioneers” for brand new standards-based units around earth systems, energy, mechanical waves, and the structures and functions of plants and animals. While these teachers would be responsible for more science content than ever before, they did not have clear direction about what to teach less of in order to create the instructional time for the additional material. As the teachers began to implement the units, they struggled to prevent instruction from becoming a frantic forced march from one topic to the next or a collection of isolated facts.
To discuss these challenges, the principals and teachers from two of the schools that were implementing the new curriculum, Graham and Parks (my school) and Cambridgeport, requested a meeting with district-level curriculum directors to address the issue. Graham and Parks and Cambridgeport are both highly diverse K–5 schools that have maintained a decades-long commitment to interdisciplinary, project-based learning. These two schools also have fought for teachers to be curriculum designers rather than merely implementers.
For meaningful teaching and learning to flourish, students must care about what they're learning; they need to know why it matters.
At the district meeting, the teachers who had been working with the new curriculum described their frustrations with being asked to teach more than they could teach well. The teachers’ desire for flexibility to craft a logical sequence of interdisciplinary learning experiences was in tension with the district’s desire to ensure common expectations across 12 elementary schools. After some discussion, district officials agreed to allow an experiment: Educators from the two schools could work together to create an interdisciplinary, project-based curriculum that would incorporate the new science and existing social studies standards into a seamless, year-long story—one designed to engage students and emphasize higher-level thinking on complex issues.
Soon thereafter, the two schools’ instructional coaches, district curriculum directors, and later the 3rd and 4th grade teachers, including myself, convened for two separate five-day “sabbaticals” funded by Sanofi Genzyme, a locally based biotech company. The task ahead of us seemed daunting. We had to weave together disparate threads of content standards, some of which were new to us, into a cohesive narrative that would engage students.
But little by little, a vision for a compelling plan emerged. We decided to address the central focus of the Massachusetts social studies curriculum frameworks—the geography and people of the five regions of the United States—by telling a story of how different people fought for a better life in each region of the country from the 1830s through the 1930s, a period of profound scientific and technological change.
We named the yearlong curriculum “Our Changing Nation.” It would be guided by a set of essential questions:
- How has the land affected the people in our nation?
- How have the people in our nation affected the land?
- When should we consider change to be progress? How can we evaluate the benefits and costs of change?
- How can we be supporters of positive change in our nation?
These questions had derived in part from an underlying goal we had for the curriculum—to create lessons that would not only impart essential content knowledge, but also empower our students by interweaving a tapestry of stories of diverse peoples fighting against oppression, adversity, and injustice. This goal also helped us prioritize the social studies standards while integrating key elements of the new science standards. We knew we couldn’t teach everything. But we could teach a compelling narrative of social change informed by scientific understanding.
A Focus on Social Complexity
During the first quarter of the school year, we studied the science of changes to the earth’s surface and the resulting variety in landforms across each region of the United States. As we studied the varied topography and geography of different regions, we concurrently studied the experiences of indigenous people in these regions prior to European settlement.
Then, for the remainder of the school year, we delved into the technological and social history of the 1830s–1930s, primarily through the lenses of the following groups:
- The Lowell Mill Girls during the 1840s who campaigned for a 10-hour work day.
- Enslaved African Americans during the 1850s and the abolitionists who fought for emancipation.
- The European and African-American pioneers who moved West after the Homestead Act of 1862.
- The Navajo during the Long Walk of 1864.
- Chinese immigrants working on the Transcontinental Railroad who went on strike in 1867.
- The Lakota who fought back against the U.S. government during the 1870s.
- The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression survivors of the 1930s.
For each of these case studies, we collaborated in teacher teams to identify primary sources, read-aloud texts, historical fiction, documentary footage, and other resources. As we traveled through time, we dug deeply into the scientific principles behind the technology of each period, giving students a hook that stimulated their natural scientific curiosity. For example, we launched our scientific study of energy with a hands-on exploration of model water wheels. Then we investigated how early industrialists capitalized on the gravitational potential energy of the Merrimack River in Lowell, Massachusetts, to provide kinetic energy for new factories through these water wheels. Then we traveled to the Tsongas Industrial Center in Lowell to explore full-size water wheels and to see a model of the Lowell factory where the mill girls worked.
Throughout the year, we emphasized social complexity as well as technology and scientific development. For example, students learned that, while the Transcontinental Railroad spurred major advances in travel and communication, it also brought buffalo hunters and the forced relocation of indigenous people.
During one lesson, we examined John Gast’s painting “American Progress” to explore his point of view about manifest destiny. Students observed the contrasting light in the east and the west, the representation of telegraph wires, and the railroad as emblems of technological “progress.” Then, through read-alouds of picture books by the Lakota author S. D. Nelson and excerpts from Ken Burns’s documentary The West, we wrestled with the Lakota peoples’ very different experience of westward expansion.
In an exercise in historical imagination, students were asked to write about how they would feel if they were Lakota and their sacred buffalo were slaughtered. One student in my class wrote: “The white people have been killing the buffalo. They are not hungry or cold. . . they kill the buffalo for wealth, and to crush them into products. I feel very mad for when we kill buffalo we use every single part. We also do special rituals to honor the buffalo. But now these white men are killing the whole population.” Another student wrote, “They take the buffalo, shoot them down one by one, and take these sacred animals apart. We need buffalo to survive. They just kill for sport.”
History’s twists and turns can feel remote when we read about them in textbooks. But by tapping into children’s imaginative capacity, we can help them delve into the events of history as participants rather than distant observers.
Contemporary Echoes
Although the focus of the year was on the historical period of the 1800s, students also thought about contemporary issues and the thorny line between “change” and “progress.” They learned about the digital technology underlying cell phones and evaluated how our lives have changed for better (and worse) as a result of this technology. They learned about energy resources and formulated opinions about whether Massachusetts should invest more heavily in wind energy. After exploring 19th century developments like the Transcontinental Railroad, which both revolutionized transportation and devastated habitats and homelands, the students were primed to appreciate the complex trade-offs we must consider when evaluating potential changes today. They also understood how building scientific knowledge could empower them to take a more active and informed role in society.
To further connect social movements of the 1800s with social movements today, students participated in an eight-session elective in which they met with experts leading current change efforts in areas such as the environment, racial equity, and immigrant rights.
Demonstrations of Learning
Throughout the year, students demonstrated their learning through projects. For example, in January, as we read the mentor text Eliza’s Freedom Road by Jerdine Nolen and studied the history of the Underground Railroad, students invented their own historical fictional characters and created scrapbooks with diary entries, persuasive speeches, and letters written from their characters’ point of view.
In April, students selected distinct topics derived from our yearlong study to develop nonfiction picture books. This project asked students to demonstrate sophisticated research skills, such as identifying relevant information from complex texts, synthesizing different reference sources, and explaining what they learned in their own words. Their final picture books, which were revised and refined over several drafts, included a range of nonfiction text features, such as tables of contents, illustrations, diagrams, glossaries, and works cited pages. Because of their excitement about their chosen topics, students were highly motivated to produce high-quality work that they could share with families and visitors at a community celebration.
In the final weeks of June, students had to choose between two options for a “public” demonstration of learning. They could either perform in a play that brought together their own historical-perspective writings or serve as a curator for an interactive science museum. Over two days in late June, we shared the play, the museum, and the nonfiction picture books with other classes, families, and community members. District leaders joined us in celebrating students’ work.
Deepening Connections
Our teaching team ended the year feeling exhausted but exuberant. The new curriculum had engaged and motivated our students, and more important, given them an opportunity to learn deeply. One thing we noticed was that student writing was markedly stronger than in previous years. We attributed the improvement not to new writing instruction strategies, but rather to students’ increased depth of knowledge and excitement about the content.
Throughout the year, our emphasis was always on social complexity as well as technology and science.
And in addition to acquiring new academic knowledge and skills, by closely examining the complexities of our nation’s past together, students deepened their connections with one another as a diverse community of learners. As one student wrote in a year-end reflection: “Together, we have made a community where difference is loved, bullying is an unknown word, and most importantly where we learn and feel at home.”
For meaningful teaching and learning to flourish, students must care about what they’re learning; they need to know why it matters. Students care when their learning experiences are part of an interconnected narrative and when these experiences spark their innate interest in big, authentic questions about people and the world we live in.
