Emergent Conceptions of Subject Integration in Teacher Education: An Action Research Study

Sandra Blenkinsop and Penelope Bailey

University of Regina

Paper presented at the International Conference,

Self-Study in Teacher Education: Empowering our Future,

Herstmonceux Castle, East Sussex, England August 5-8, 1996

 

Emergent Conceptions of Subject Integration in Teacher Education: An Action Research Study

The concept of subject area integration is a currently popular idea in education. According to some (Colvin & Ross, 1991), it has the power to transform teaching from the transmission of isolated, fragmented information to the facilitation of pupils' construction of meaningful, interrelated understandings. Many current textbooks on teaching, including the one Penny used in her science methods course (Carin & Sund, 1993) and the one I used in my language arts methods course (Irvin, 1990), specifically recommend the practice of integration. Despite widespread support for the idea of integration, Colvin and Ross cautioned that putting integration into practice would be difficult because it "presupposes effective instructional methods of which few teachers are adequately aware." (p. 1069) Penny and I, through our research, have tried to address this issue. We have tried to help our teacher education students construct the knowledge needed to integrate hands-on, inquiry science and language arts. This paper focuses on the work we have done to explore the relationship between an integrated science-language arts module (Figure 1) we developed and the evolving understanding and practice of integration our students subsequently demonstrated.

 

In this paper, we are reporting preliminary findings from the third phase of an action research project (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988) aimed at reshaping the way in which we teach our students about subject area integration. During the course of the first two phases of our research, Penny and I had developed and refined an integrated science-language arts module. This module consisted of introductory activities that we taught separately in our own classrooms, hands-on science-language arts activities that both of us facilitated in the science lab, and closing activities that we presented separately. In the module, Penny stressed the importance of engaging children in authentic science activity, and I stressed the importance of engaging children in forms of reading and writing typically used in the process of scientific investigation. During the module, we had the students participate in hands-on activities comparing products in a consumer product testing unit. As an extension of the module we asked the students to write journal entries and to do assignments in which we required them to plan integrated activities.

 

Method

 

At the time we taught the integrated module, both of us were teaching the same group of students. They were enrolled in methods courses in the middle-years stream of the Elementary Education Program at the University of Regina. From the beginning of the study, we kept written records of our planning, our observations and our reflections. We also kept copies of students' journals and assignments. More recently, we have contacted the students who participated in the module and who have now completed their first year of teaching. We have been interviewing them and recording their responses to questionnaires. At this point, we have studied the journals and assignments of all of the students, and we have explored four of the students interviews and questionnaires in-depth. The specific examples we have used in this paper are taken from these four students. The more general understandings we have developed have emerged from the journals and assignments of all of the students. As we have read and reread our data, we have searched for patterns of growth in the students' understanding of integration and have tried to make connections between these patterns and our own teaching.

 

Connections between Students' Understanding of Integration and Our Own Teaching

 

At the outset, before we taught the integrated module, our students' understanding of subject area integration was practically non-existent. Betty's comment below gives a sense of the state of our students' prior knowledge.

 

I felt I was sort of in a fog when I was first here, when all this terminology like "integration" was tossed about. I just sort of thought that they [science and language arts] were separate areas. (Betty, Interview, pp. 2-3)

 

Comments such as Betty's reminded us that, when we first met our students, most of them had not experienced subject area integration in their own school experiences. Their comments showed that they had neither understanding of integration as a concept nor awareness of it as a practice.

 

Immediately after we presented the integrated module, students' science journal entries showed that they now had a rudimentary understanding of inquiry science, that they understood the importance of integration, and that they were aware of some of its critical facets. Jerry's journal entry below is an example of the type of understanding students were beginning to construct about the special relationship between science, reading and writing.

 

The one idea that really struck me was that we must not only teach children to read books, we must also teach children how to be scientifically literate. This includes how to accurately read charts, graphs, stats., etc. ... we are teaching them to be able to survive in this age of information... (Jerry, Science Journal, p. 2).

 

Jerry's comments, like the comments of other students showed an awareness of the importance of teaching science-related forms of reading and writing. From the students' comments we could see that there were clear connections between the integrated module that we had presented and the students' journal entries. Their comments reflected our emphasis on the educative value of integrating science and language arts, and on the types of activities that would engage children in science inquiry, reading and writing.

 

At the end of our courses, the students submitted their assignments - science activity packages Penny had assigned, and year-long plans for "language arts across the-curriculum" that I had assigned. As we read these assignments, we noticed that the students had planned detailed, inquiry-oriented, hands-on activities that required engagement in specific science processes such as observation, hypothesizing, experimentation, and recording. We also noticed that they had planned activities that would require children to use specific types of reading and writing such as graphs, charts, diagrams and other forms of text typically used in science. Although the science topics focused on in students' plans were not related to the consumer product testing topic we had focused on during the integrated module, the science, reading and writing activities they planned reflected processes such as planning experiments, carrying out experiments, recording results and reporting which students had participated in during the module.

 

In our courses, Penny and I had not required our students to integrate science and language arts in their pre-internship practicum. We later discovered from their science journals and from their interview and questionnaire responses that many of them had gone beyond the required planning tasks to actually using integrated science-language arts activities in their teaching. Pat's account presented below is representative of they way students described the integration of science and language arts during their pre-internship practicum.

 

Marilyn and I ... had five or six stations... based on things we had done here in class. I remember one of them was on density. We just had the materials there, and the kids could see what's going to happen and explore different things with density.... They were supposed to write at each station.... I remember that handout [on different forms of science writing]. We actually used some of that. (Pat, Interview, pp. 19-20)

 

Comments such as Pat's showed us that while the students were taking our courses, they had used practicum opportunities to engage children in learning experiences which featured hands-on, inquiry science accompanied by related reading and writing activities. We saw that the students had required children to use thinking processes such as hypothesizing and experimenting, and that they had engaged children in using related forms of reading and writing. We noticed that they had not merely copied the consumer product testing activities we had used in the module but had applied the concept of integration to the curricular content of the grade they were teaching. On the whole, it seemed to us that the integrated module had provided our students with not only the academic knowledge they needed but also with the practical knowledge they needed to integrate the teaching of science and language arts. Even so, we wondered if the students' understandings were well enough established to support integrated teaching after they completed our courses.

 

We found that for some students the concepts about integration established during our courses had indeed supported their integration of science and language arts during internship and first year teaching. Their comments suggested that they had used two types of integration, one that involved having children read and write while engaging in science activities and another that involved having children read and write about science topics. Jerry's comments about his unit on heat are typical of those made about integrating reading and writing into activity science.

 

We did experiments [on heat] using the hot plates and things.... We did things like boiling snow to see how long it took to make water ... and determining the boiling point of water when you add salt or other chemicals. We would be writing them up at the same time. (Jerry, Interview, p. 15)

 

Jerry's unit demonstrated the type of integration we had in mind when we tried to model it for our students. We noticed, however, that the way in which he and other students spoke about teaching science and language arts after their first year of teaching was quite different from the way in which they had expressed themselves in the assignments they had completed for our courses. We saw that, although students had used terms such as "hands-on" and "writers' workshop," their discourse rarely included use of words that articulated the inquiry process or that identified specific types of reading or writing. It seemed that, during internship and during the first year of teaching, our former students' understanding of the specifics of science and language arts teaching were becoming less defined. There was little evidence of the precise language we had deliberately used in the module to specify the types of thinking used in inquiry science and the types of written text that would accompany them.

 

The second type of integration students used in their internship and first year teaching featured having children read and write about science topics as opposed to having them read and write while doing science. This approach had not been demonstrated in our module, and we wondered why students had chosen to use this approach. Two plausible explanations emerged from our exploration of pre-internship journals, interview and questionnaire responses. First, we thought that some students may have chosen to have pupils read and write about science, rather than do hands-on science because they lacked commitment to a hands-on approach and had reverted to a more traditional practice. Alternately, we thought our students may have given in to the widespread tendency to relegate science teaching to a secondary position in favour of "the basics" (see for example Baker & Saul, 1994). As we thought about these possibilities, we recalled how deliberate we had been in our attempt to show students the value of hands-on, inquiry science, and we remembered how careful we had been to emphasize that teaching children to read and write about scientific investigation was, in fact, teaching the basics.

 

Discussion

When we presented the integrated module in the third phase of our action research project, we tried to focus our teaching in the landscape between theory and practice (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996). We presented theoretical knowledge and turned it into a lived experience in the hands-on, workshop activities. In this way, we tried to help students construct both academic and practical knowledge about subject area integration. During the time we taught our students, we saw that their initial, foggy impressions of integration had evolved into clearly articulated understandings of the ways in which various types of reading and writing could be used in the process of scientific inquiry. After the students proceeded to internship and first year teaching, we saw that while some of them still integrated reading and writing with hands-on, inquiry science, the clarity of their understanding had faded somewhat. We also saw that some of the students did not have a strong commitment to hands-on, inquiry science. Despite these observations, we have come to the conclusion that, for the most part, our teaching of the integrated module had a marked influence on students' academic understanding of integration and on their use of it in the classroom. We think that the strength of our influence as well as its longevity was related to the way in which we taught our courses. We believe that the presentation of theoretical knowledge in each subject area prior to the workshop made it possible for students to extract professionally meaningful information from the hands-on, workshop activities that followed. We think that these activities gave the students the practical knowledge they needed to plan and carry out integrated activities with children. Further, we think that in addition to our teaching, the assignments we gave, especially the science activity packages, played a major role in the students' understanding of integration. These assignments seemed to provide the in-depth learning and the ongoing models students needed to support the integration of science, reading and writing in their future teaching.

 

As this phase of our research draws to a close, we again look toward reshaping our teaching so that it better supports students' construction of knowledge about the integration of science and language arts. At present we are pondering questions that have emerged over the course of the study. We wonder, for example, how we might change our teaching so that the concepts our students construct about integration will be more resistant to fading. We wonder too how we might reshape our teaching so that it will encourage more students to develop a strong commitment to using hands-on, inquiry science. We also wonder how we might help our students construct the concept that teaching reading and writing within the context of science activity is not a frill, but is, in fact, another form of teaching "the basics." Finally, we wonder how we might provide ongoing support for students trying to integrate science and language arts in their struggle against the tide of common practice. As we continue to revise and reflect upon our teaching, we would like to invite others who are studying their own teacher education practices to join us in our ongoing conversations about the integration of subject areas.

References

Baker, L. & Saul, W. (1994). Considering science and language arts connections: A study in teacher cognition. Journal of Research in Science Teaching. Vol. 31, No 9, pp. 1023-1037.

Carin, A. A.(1993). Teaching Science through Discovery (7th ed.). Toronto: Merrill

Clandinin, J. D., & Connelly, F. M. (1996). Teachers' professional knowledge landscapes: Teacher stories - stories of teachers - school stories - stories of schools. Educational Researcher, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 24-30.

Colvin, C. & Ross, P. (1991). The science / language connection: Why to make it...how to do it. The Reading Teacher, Vol. 45. No. 3, pp. 248-249.

Irvin, J. L. (1990). Reading and the Middle School Student. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Kemmis, S. & McTaggart, R. (Eds.). (1988). The action research planner. (3rd ed.). Victoria, Australia; Deakin University Press.

 

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Figure 1: Integrated Science, Reading and Writing Module

 

This module featured lecture, discussion and demonstration as well as an

integrated workshop in which students engaged in hands-on experiences in

an inquiry science unit on consumer product testing.

 

Introductory Activities -

Separate Science and Language Arts Class Periods

Science

Focus:

- extensive engagement in hands-on inquiry science

- discussion of reasons for integration

 

Reading and Writing

Focus:

- reading and writing across the curriculum - science in particular

- types of reading and writing conventionally used in science

- appropriate uses of reading and writing "before, " "during," or

"after" science activity

 

The Workshop - Combined Science and Language Arts Periods

 

Topic: Consumer Product Testing

Science

Activities:

- collecting and exploring lab materials and product to be tested

- making hypotheses about how to compare products

- planning tests

- making predictions as to results

- doing tests

- observing results

 

Reading and Writing

Activities:

- recording hypotheses, predictions, procedures, observations

- constructing written and graphic reports in accordance with

assigned roles

 

Role Playing

- acting like scientists reporting to competing companies, Green

Peace, consumer's magazine

 

Closing Activities - Separate Science and Language Arts Class Periods

 

Science

- discussing inquiry science process and connections to reading and

writing

 

Reading and Writing

- discussing reading and writing done during integrated workshop.

- extending types of reading to textbook reading, studying,

note-making and doing library research projects

 

Assignments

Science Journal, Science Activity Package, Language Arts Year-Long Plan

& Post-Module Reflections

Reading of Science and Language Arts Required Textbooks and Curriculum

Guides