Interdisciplinary Teaching? It Only Takes Talent, Time, and Treasure

Abstract

It had been a long day. I walked out of my English classroom, down the hall, turned the comer, and entered another world-my colleague Joe Young's room. I could see him through the cracked door of his workroom storing away a set of slides. I glanced around at his displays. Suspended from the ceiling were molecular configurations. In the corner were stuffed, mounted ducks. His rattlesnakes dozed in their glass cages. An aquarium filled with silvery and multistriped fish bubbled lazily next to neatly placed rows of microscopes. A cougar head and skin splayed out on one wall. Racks of popular and more scholarly scientific periodicals now sat idly in his reading area. I soaked in the visual richness of his environment and called out to him. Joe Young taught dynamite courses in biology and earth science to freshmen through seniors in a small town high school, located in a rural corner of southeastern Washington state. I was the junior and senior English teacher with a range of courses from AP English to speech and drama to journalism. I loved the natural world; Young happened to love literature and writing. In the ten years we taught together, we often chatted about our mutual interests that crossed over our distinct disciplines. It really never entered our minds to teach a course together, despite our deep discussions about nature and writing and literature. Too many factors worked against such an idea at the high school level-rigid schedules, teaching classes during the same time blocks, multiple sponsorships of extracurricular activities, no rewards for the planning and curricular development necessary to teach interdisciplinary, etc. The list can go on, but the one regret I have as I left high school teaching after 13 years is that I never even tried to cross the barriers and teach a course with Joe Young, a gifted and much respected science teacher.