Curriculum Integration refers to the philosophy of blending the curriculum areas through focusing on

‘concepts and big ideas’, which are then investigated by the students in ways which attempt to get
students actively engaged in their learning. When looking at Curriculum Integration there are many
different explanations for the stages and approaches associated with how it is adopted by schools,
classrooms and teachers, ranging from multidisciplinary, where there is a low level of integration to
transdisciplinary, where students negotiate the topics to be studied with the teacher. When looking at
particular models and examples of how the curriculum can be integrated we can look at the two
learning areas of Social Sciences and Technology, their aims and components and how this can lend to
the integration of these curriculum areas.

The concept of integrating curriculum is nothing new. It’s been around, in fact, since the 1800s and was
advocated by such well-known educational theorists as John Dewey and Meredith Smith. It has gained
recent attention, however and more and more educators think that it is the best way to teach. There
are many views on how curriculum integration works. Velde (2000) talks about curriculum integration
as a philosophy shift across the entire school, where learning develops from teacher directed to child
centred learning where students and teachers become lifelong learners using strategies for solving
problems and investigations through thinking, gathering information and analysis. The true integration
comes from student discussion and the concept of allowing students to determine the content of their
learning. When looking at this more closely we can see the idea of looking at what issues are facing the
community, students and school at the time of discussion. Students are enabled to make choices based
on discussion around the issues on what the areas of study will be for them. Learning is then
investigation based and the teacher works as a facilitator to the learning, finding the correlation to the
curriculum learning areas through evaluation and assessment. The difficulty in this type of full
curriculum integration is the mind shift of the teachers, management and the entire school.

A great example of this type of curriculum and child centred learning can be seen through the eyes of
A.S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill School. Neil said that `The function of the child is to live his own
life – not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the
educator who thinks he knows best.' (http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/pages/history.html) Neil
maintained that the school must adjust to the child, so at Summerhill all lessons are optional, as well as
the structured timetable, there is free access to art, woodwork and computers. Adults are not there to
create things for the children to do- they need to create things for themselves. Sports, games and other
amusements are all generated by the pupils and adults, according to need. In terms of the curriculum,
we can see that in this type of learning environment children work alongside teachers to create the
necessary strategies for learning. Assessment and evaluation provide the basis for the learning
intentions and