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It is important to begin conversations about creating interdisciplinary units among teachers at school. Heidi Hayes Jacob writes about it in Chapter 5 of her book Mastering Global Literacy. She highlights the dates ways to teach 'the world': map term memorization, country locating in isolation, old standards from 1994. Jacob also brings further attention to the Asia Society's four competencies of investigating, recognizing perspectives, communicating ideas and taking action.
In my current position, I have not had nearly enough opportunities to create interdisciplinary units with other teachers in my building. The biggest hurdle to this is the manner in which scheduling of students takes place. I am in the 'Related Arts' section of the schedule, and in the interest of 'mixing it up,' a few students from various classes in the same grade are put into individual sections. Thus, my class sections are mixes of between 3 and 5 homeroom classes. This creates some difficulty in managing the planning of interdisciplinary units. Often times classes aren't studying the same topic, and that would be difficult to support.
I could see, if at some point the schedule is modified so that I teach one section of only one class of students at a time, that this would be possible. When students are studying the Revolutionary War and battles and important people, we could supplement this learning with mapping battle locations in Google Earth. We could take virtual tours of different parts of the world during a culture or country unit that a class is engaged in.
In the meantime, I do my best to integrate global issues into my curriculum by discussing topics I know that all classes have already covered, and hope that the students' teachers have not already engaged in the same activities.
Jacobs, Heidi Hayes. Mastering Global Literacy. Indiana: Solution Tree, 2014. Print.