A Caveat: Curriculum Integration Isn't Always a Good Idea.

Curriculum integration is some times necessary to teach about topics that cut across or tran scend school subjects. Even when inte gration is not necessary, it is often desirable, as when content drawn from one subject is used to enrich the teach ing of another (period artwork used in history) or when skills learned in one subject are used to process or apply information learned in another (debates or report writing in social studies). However, curriculum integration is not an end in itself but a means for accom plishing basic educational goals. Fur thermore, recommended activities may not help achieve those goals, nor are they always implemented effectively. We offer this caveat because, in the course of examining recent elementary social studies series, we saw many sug gestions made in the name of integra tion that we consider counterproductive. Too often, activities described as ways to integrate social studies with other subjects either tack educational value in any subject or promote progress toward significant goals in another subject but not in social studies. Many of these activities are pointless busywork (alphabetizing the state capitals). Others may have value as lan guage arts activities but don't belong in social studies curriculum (exercises that use social studies content but focus on pluralizing nouns). Moreover, many suggested activities require time-consuming artistic or construction work. Some of these develop—or at least allow for—oppor tunities to use social studies knowledge (constructing maps of the school), but others simply lack educational value (carving pumpkins to look like U.S. presidents). The same is true of various role-play, simulation, collage, and scrapbook activities. So-called integration activities some times even distort social studies content. For example, a unit on pioneer life includes a sequencing-skills exercise built around five steps in building log cabins. Three of these five steps are arbitrarily imposed rather than logically necessary. The authors apparently included this exercise not because it developed key knowledge about pioneer life, but because they wanted to put an exercise in sequential ordering some where in the curriculum. Ill-conceived integration ideas also sometimes require students to do things that are strange, difficult, or even impossible. One activity calls for stu dents to use pantomime to communicate one of the six reasons for the Constitu tion as stated in its preamble. We do not think that social studies time should be spent practicing pantomime skills, but even if we did, we would select a more appropriate subject for pantomime than reasons for the Constitution. Finally, suggested activities some times call for students to do things they are not prepared to do, either because the task is ambiguous (drawing a hun gry face) or because it requires them to use knowledge that has not been taught in the curriculum and is not likely to have been acquired elsewhere (having 1 st graders role-play scenes from Mexico when all they have learned about Mexico is its location on a map). In view of these problems, educators should consider integration a potential tool that is feasible and desirable in some situations but not in all. An activ ity is appropriate because it promotes progress toward significant educational goals, not merely because it cuts across subject-matter lines. Furthermore, in assessing the time spent in integrated activities versus subject-area ones, educators should weigh the costeffectiveness of the activities in accom plishing each subject's major goals. Before we have students engage in activities designed to promote curricu lum integration, let's apply criteria: 1. Activities should be educationally significant, ones desirable even if they did not include the integration feature. 2. Activities should foster, rather than disrupt or nullify, accomplishment of major goals in each subject area. LJ