A Reflection on Interdisciplinary Units for Teaching: Advantages and Disadvantages

What is an interdisciplinary unit (IDU)? And IDU as a unit or lesson plan that cuts across the entire curriculum. For instance, an IDU on the Civil War would have its roots in the Social Studies curriculum. The Language Arts teacher might have students writing letters home from the perspective of a soldier. The Science class might look at how gunpowder worked. The Music class could learn Civil War era music and songs. The Art class could design battle flags. The Math class could learn how to read charts and graphs using Dyer's Compendium, which listed dead, missing and wounded. After looking at interdisciplinary units, my belief in them as a useful tool was definitely increased. To be able to carry a theme from one subject to another is a strong way to reinforce learning. If you have a greater theme to hang smaller ideas from, it becomes easier to understand those ideas, whether in that context or not.

The only real problems in IDU's lie in the structure of the school itself. A school I used to teach at had the Language Arts classes aligned to the State testing. There is little to no flexibility in the class structure. As a result, everything hinges on what Language Arts is teaching if you wanted to set up an IDU. If any one department is unable to participate, you can never truly have a real IDU. In a perfect world however, IDU's are really neat. I have not had the ability to do a full blown IDU, but have had the opportunity to overlap into the other subjects quite a bit. It's neat to have a class split into the Union and Confederacy sides and then have them take the rivalry too far, then go to Language Arts and read The Wave. The kids made the connection and it really stuck with them.

To me that is what IDU's are all about: making connections. You could really see the light bulbs come on when they came back to my class and told me about how the book was just like our class, and they could better understand how events led to the Civil War as well as the Holocaust. Solid education and teaching relies a lot on scaffolding of knowledge. Students need a base knowledge to give them a point of reference for future information. If the kids can hang the knowledge on other things, it tends to stay hung.