Why Science curriculum be integrated with other disciplines? What is the need? A very inspiring story on this issue.

1. Why Integrate?: A Case for Collating the
Curriculum
SEPTEMBER 23, 2008
There is a strong case to be made for integrating curriculum. It strengthens skills that students
encounter in one content area but also practice in another, and it can lead to the mastery of those
skills. It is also a more authentic way of learning because it reflects what we experience, both
professionally and personally, in the world. And it can be a way to engage students who might
otherwise check out when we introduce them to a challenging subject or to one they don't feel is
relevant.
Sometimes, if you're really lucky, integrating curriculum can create the conditions in which students
discover their passions. They find something they love doing so much that it compels them to
persevere through all kinds of personal and academic challenges, to graduate from high school, and
to go to college to pursue their dreams. And in the part of Oakland, California, where I work, this
achievement often constitutes saving a life.
So when I think about making a case for interdisciplinary studies, I think immediately of George. (All
student names in this post are pseudonyms.) I wonder what would have happened to him had Keiko
Suda not put a video camera in his hands in seventh grade.
The Curriculum
Keiko Suda was George's seventh-grade math and science teacher. She was charged with teaching
cell biology as part of California's seventh-grade standards. At the ASCEND School, where Suda and
I taught together, teachers were encouraged to develop curricular units that emphasized depth over
breadth and to teach our students how to transfer their acquired knowledge to other contexts.
(See this Edutopia.org article and this Edutopia video about the school.)
Suda designed a semester-long study of HIV/AIDS with the guiding question "How does HIV/AIDS
affect us physically and socially?" Students learned about the immune system and cell biology and
explored what it means to live with HIV/AIDS.
As a culminating project, students wrote, directed, produced, edited, and starred in a movie that
answered their guiding question. One class focused on the social implications of living with HIV, while
the other class depicted what happens to the immune system.
Evidence of Learning
A skillful teacher must assess an instructional unit while it is under way and afterward, and the
evaluation must be based on evidence of learning. Suda's formative and summative assessments
provided overwhelming evidence that students had mastered the science standards. This finding,
however, was just the beginning.
During that semester, I witnessed students transferring their knowledge of HIV. In the portable
classroom next to Suda's, I taught history and English to the same group of students. Our content for

2. that semester was the bubonic plague, and students explored how the plague transformed the social,
economic, political, and religious structures of medieval Europe.
When we began the study, a few weeks or so after they'd started studying HIV, one of the first
questions from a student was, "Who was scapegoated during the plague?" Based on her
understanding of what some HIV-positive people have faced, she predicted that the same experience
might have occurred during another epidemic -- and she was right. This was powerful evidence of
deep learning.
The culminating project in my class was a dramatic performance. As students applied the concepts
they'd learned with Suda to their understanding of the plague, they also practiced and perfected
scriptwriting and acting skills for this project.
I credit my own deeper understanding of viruses to the movies students created with Suda. It took
Nestor's frightening portrayal of an HIV cell to permanently etch into my mind how HIV operates.
In One Strike, he hovers menacingly over the bound and immobilized immune system cell and
declares, "You're going to be my host. I will enter you and hijack your nucleus." This statement
permanently stuck to some receptor in my brain, whereas before, I had never been able to retain the
same information when it was delivered in print.
More evidence of deep learning became apparent once our students had graduated from the
ASCEND School and had gone off to high school. In ninth grade, Maria wrote a poem about a young
woman who contracts HIV. Her moving poem, one of thousands of entries, won an award in a contest
sponsored by author Alice Walker.
Finding One's Footing Through Film
But it is George who comes to mind as overwhelmingly compelling evidence of the power of
integrating curriculum. For George, the experience of making a movie for Keiko Suda's class was his
first taste of filmmaking. From that moment, he was hooked. Fortunately, he attended an Oakland
high school where he received tremendous support to pursue his passion. Over his four years there,
he made three movies, taught other students in a filmmaking class, and wrote a guide to filmmaking.
During those years, George also experienced a series of traumatic personal losses. There were
numerous times when he told me he just wanted to give up, particularly as he watched many of his
cousins and peers drop out of school, join gangs, and have babies. What kept him going, he said,
was his desire to be a filmmaker.
In June 2008, George graduated from high school. This fall, he is attending the University of California
at Santa Barbara, where he will study filmmaking. At his high school graduation, he spoke of his
intention to become a director. His father, an immigrant, wept while watching his only son graduate.
"How do you feel about his decision to study film?" I asked George's father.
He shrugged and responded, "He's discovered his passion. I'm happy for him. What more could a
father want?"

3. As a result of Keiko Suda's brilliant interdisciplinary study, George, who didn't like science, mastered
seventh-grade cell-biology standards, strengthened his writing, developed social and interpersonal
skills, and discovered a lifelong passion that propelled him through high school and on to higher
education.