How can the secondary school learning model be adapted to provide for more meaningful curriculum integration?

Abstract

Interest in curriculum integration (CI) has resurged recently as schools seek to bring together knowledge from separate curriculum areas to create a more holistic, integrated learning experience for students to address the demands of ‘twenty-first century’ learning. As the educational sciences deliver new research on the role of the arts in cognitive development, educators are also refreshing their perspective on what is termed ‘arts integration’. This study set out to investigate the introduction of a curriculum integration model in a secondary school setting, focusing on the arts. The findings indicate that collaborative learning became a powerful strategy for enhancing student’s social and motivational skills, specifically that of compromise. For a Curriculum Integration model to succeed in secondary schools there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way that secondary schools structure their timetables and their learning environments.