Essential Interdisciplinary Questions for Curriculum Design

Let’s say you are a teacher of science, about to design a curriculum unit on light. Wiggins and McTighe (Understanding by Design, ASCD, 1998) would argue that one of the first things you should do is to identify the essential questions, key understandings, or chief learnings, about light. For instance, I remember Grant saying that one of his favorite questions was “Is light a particle or a wave?” 

Let’s extrapolate. Such a question also suggests an essential understanding that lies at the heart of science as a discipline: “How is a scientific hypothesis formed from apparent opposites?” 

Let’s go even further. Such a question also suggests an essential understanding about inquiry itself: “Which methodologies and perspectives are best applied to resolve apparent opposites?” This last understanding or question is interdisciplinary. In fact, as Jamie McKenzie points out: 

Most essential questions are interdisciplinary in nature. They cut across the lines created by schools and scholars to mark the terrain of departments and disciplines. 

Helping to design Ontario’s Interdisciplinary Studies curriculum a decade ago, I established several key concepts and goals that were at the heart of interdisciplinary work. In hindsight, I would now synthesize them into the following eight questions that, by extrapolation, a teacher could use to strengthen and focus any curriculum unit, at any grade.

1. How does this unit connect concepts and skills from different subjects and disciplines for deeper understanding?

2. How does this unit help students analyze and evaluate complex information from divergent sources?

3. How does this unit develop students' abilities to plan, work, and communicate independently and collaboratively?

4. How does this unit encourage students to develop inquiry and research methods from diverse disciplines to solve problems and to find solutions?

5. How does this unit develop students’ abilities to use different perspectives and challenge their assumptions about significant issues in their life and world?

6. How does this unit harness students’ higher-level critical- and creative-thinking skills and technologies from a variety of disciplines to implement innovative solutions.

7. How does this unit help students to synthesize insights form different disciplines and extend them to new contexts and real-life  tasks?

8. How does this unit foster students' love of learning and an understanding of how to learn?

So my essential question for today is “How can you use interdisciplinary questions to deepen the design of your next disciplinary unit?” 

Can you use your interdisciplinary knowledge to identify who wrote one of my favourite interdisciplinary quotations?

[It was] an initiation into the love of learning, of learning how to learn, that was revealed to me by my BLS masters as a matter of interdisciplinary cognition—that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else.