Hot Fudge Sundae Quiz and other collaborative ventures: Interdisciplinary teaching and learning, The

Educational Forum, The, Spring 2002 by Spalding, Elizabeth

Can you imagine making and eating a hot fudge sundae to demonstrate your understanding of principles of heat transfer? How about using your math skills to plan a budget and select players for an NBA franchise or studying the psychological effects of stress on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth? Preservice secondary teachers have designed and taught these and other lessons as part of an interdisciplinary teaching project required during the first semester of a one-year, graduate-level teacher education program, the Masters with Initial Certification (MIC) program at the University of Kentucky. For the past four years, I have been studying the impact of this project on the learning of preservice teachers. Data for this study were gathered from four successive cohorts of preservice teachers. The principal data source was a questionnaire that students completed voluntarily after teaching their interdisciplinary lesson or unit. Other data sources included field notes of classroom observations, preservice teachers' lesson plans, and written reflections on the project.

Interdisciplinary teaching has been one of the more popular curriculum-reform efforts of the past decade. Though by no means a new idea, teaching that crosses or integrates the disciplines makes a new kind of sense in light of contemporary thinking about knowledge, learning, human development, and societal needs (Beane 1997). If one agrees that maintaining timehonored disciplinary boundaries may no longer be in the best interests of today's schools, students, and teachers, then it is important to understand how the next generation of high school teachers feels toward crossing those boundaries.

INTERDISCIPLINARY INSTRUCTION AND SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHING

Definitions of "interdisciplinary" abound (Beane 1997; Tchudi and Lafer 1996). For purposes of this study, an interdisciplinary approach is "a knowledge view and curriculum approach that consciously applies methodology and language from more than one discipline to examine a central theme, issue, problem, topic, or experience" (Jacobs 1989, 8). Here, I use the terms "interdisciplinary" and "integrated" synonymously. Ideally, planning and implementing interdisciplinary curricula are collaborative activities that occur between two or more teachers, but it is also possible that one teacher may integrate content from other disciplines into his or her subject area.

A number of recent trends in K-12 educational research and policy have led to the widespread popularity of interdisciplinary teaching, including brain research on contextual learning; the middle school movement; whole language philosophy and practice; the need to embed skills and knowledge in lifelike contexts; the motivational benefits to students when they work on complex, real-world problems; and claims of increased achievement when students make connections across subjects (Carter and Mason 1997; Hargreaves and Moore 2000; Mason 1996; McBee 2000; Willis 1994). In addition, several contemporary curriculum movements-multicultural education, global education, environmental education, multimedia education, education for critical thinking and problem-solving, and service learning-are interdisciplinary in nature (Tchudi and Lafer 1996).

Interdisciplinary approaches have been successfully implemented in many elementary and middle schools-but, at the high school level, interdisciplinary efforts are often limited to collaborations among English and social studies teachers in offering courses such as American Studies or World Studies (Little 1995). The structure of most high schools presents formidable obstacles to interdisciplinary teaching: a crowded schedule that leaves little time for collaborative planning; departmental and school policies such as subject-area exams that reinforce isolation of the subjects; and the physical layout of the schools themselves (Little 1995). Teachers are organized into subject departments, and departments are often isolated from one another. High school teachers, moreover, tend to see themselves as subject specialists (Ball and Lacey 1995). Thus, they base their professional identity "not in teaching, but in the teaching of their subject" (Siskin 1994,153). This subject-oriented perspective of high school teachers presents yet another barrier to interdisciplinary instruction at the secondary level.

Despite these stumbling blocks, interdisciplinary teaching is especially important at the high school level. As Hargreaves and Macmillan (1995, 168) noted, "What is becoming disturbingly clear in our secondary schools is the inability of the present subject system and organizational structure to meet the needs of students and indeed the longer-term needs of their staffs in a complex and rapidly changing postmodern society." As McLaughlin (1993, 98) has argued, "Effective responses to the challenges of contemporary classrooms require a spirited, reflective professional community of teachers." In many ways, the traditional subject-department organization of high school works against the formation of such communities; interdisciplinary teaching is one way to begin creating them.