By Lauren Brown
In my first year of teaching, I taught 7th geography with a wonderful team of teachers in central Wisconsin. It was the early 1990s, and the school was transitioning from a departmentalized junior high model to a middle school model with interdisciplinary teams. I was on “Team Wizards,” as the newbie social studies teacher, along with Michelle in Language Arts, Denise for math and Joe in science.
It was Joe who proposed our first interdisciplinary unit: Prairies. His classes would study the climate, plant and animal life of the biome. As the culminating event, we restored a plot of land in front of the school back into a prairie. In math class, students made graphs comparing the lengths of roots of prairie plants and calculated the cost of the materials we needed to restore our little prairie. In language arts class, students had their choice of several novels set in prairies.
I divided up my social studies students into 3 groups: one would take the U.S. prairies and research the Native American peoples of the Great Plains, the 2nd group would study the Maasai of Kenya and Tanazania, and the 3rd, the Mongols of the Asian steppes. We made maps, compared and contrasted the different cultures, and analyzed how they adapted to life in grasslands.
Later in the year, we developed an interdisciplinary unit on Africa that we later presented at a national middle school conference. We created other units, too: a mini-unit on the Iditarod, and one on rivers.
Our own community was located on the Wisconsin River, and so the following year we decided to begin the school year with a “Global River Conference.” Pairs of students were each assigned a river from some place in the world and tasked with creating a display and talking points about the geography and history of their river. In science, they learned about the water cycle, erosion, and the local ecology of our river. They read and composed poems about rivers. They made charts comparing the length of the world’s rivers and in math class did problems like calculating how many times longer the Nile was than the Wisconsin River.
Then I left Wisconsin and middle school for a while and taught high school U.S. history. It was a large suburban Chicago high school, and the English department might as well have been at the other end of the universe from the history department. Other than at the copy machine, I rarely saw or spoke with any of the English teachers.
But I did know that they studied American literature in 11th grade, because my 11th graders told me they read The Great Gatsby when we got to the history of Roaring Twenties. I remember thinking it was a missed opportunity – perhaps the English and History departments could coordinate the timing better, so students would be reading Gatsby at the same time they were learning about the historical context in my class?
Glimmers of opportunity
When I returned to teaching middle school in the 2010s, the interest in interdisciplinary teaching seemed to be fading. But there were glimmers of opportunity: coordinating with the ELA teacher about writing assignments and vocabulary lists, reading Ellie Wiesel’s Night in ELA at the same time as studying my unit on the history of the Holocaust.
When I taught about the coming of World War II, there was a moment when we talked about the Spanish Civil War. I could always count on a few students piping up, “Oh! We did a whole thing on that in Spanish class!” There it was…that realization from students that the content they were learning in one class was so important that – behold! – it would pop up in another context.
I could hear the excitement in my students’ voices and faces when they’d tell me, “Hey, Ms. Brown, remember when we learned about Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute? Well, guess what we learned about in science class today?!” And they’d tell me about the government study on syphilis that leveraged the Institute’s credibility and local standing to gain trust among Black participants.
Or when I used poems like Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” in our immigration unit or Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” in our study of the U.S. annexation of the Philippines. My students would proudly show off their ability to recognize literature terms like alliteration, metaphor, simile, and imagery. Some of the very same students who, the week before, had griped about the English teacher’s poetry unit were now finding pleasure in putting those skills to use, showing them off to their history teacher.
Widening knowledge, deepening learning
Lately, as I’ve been reading more about the science of learning – things like retrieval practice, and the importance of knowledge from folks like cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham and others, I’m circling back to thinking about how useful interdisciplinary study can be in both widening students’ knowledge base and deepening their learning.
There are only so many days in the English teacher’s poetry unit – a limited number of poems that can be read. So why not use poems in other subjects? A science teacher might use Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” as a discussion starter to discuss the tension between scientific analysis and emotional awe.
A math teacher might use “Numbers” by Mary Cornish to make the point that numbers provide structure and meaning to our lives, allowing us to communicate and make sense of the world around us. Those two poems + the two I use in history class = four additional opportunities for students to stretch their poetry analysis muscles. That’s four new poets and four new poems students will have encountered.
Finding simple ways to coordinate
Developing a full blown interdisciplinary unit requires significant time and careful coordination among a team of teachers. But before taking on a project like that, there are simple efforts we can make as teachers to coordinate more with each other. We can make it a point to speak with other teachers about their curriculum. Consider our own curriculum and places where there might be overlap with another teacher’s content.
Take notes throughout this school year – maybe you’ll find an area of overlap that could be further developed into an actual interdisciplinary unit. Maybe there are mathematical problems that come up in your science or social studies class that the math teacher at your school could incorporate.
And don’t forget the elective teachers! Music, art and even physical education are rich with possibilities:
►Our 8th graders study the Harlem Renaissance in history and language arts. Perhaps we can also check in with the music teacher. Students can hear Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington in one class and then analyze the cultural impact in another.
►A colleague once emailed the art teacher a few political cartoons her students were analyzing during a unit on westward expansion. A week later, students were sketching their own in art class – turns out, the art teacher had a unit on visual metaphor lined up anyway. It took ten minutes of coordination, and the impact was huge.
►A unit in P.E. on fitness tracking and heart rate zones could be integrated into a science unit on the circulatory system, enriching students’ understanding and appreciation for the human body in both classes.
Interdisciplinary teaching doesn’t have to mean launching a huge new unit. Sometimes it’s as simple as a hallway conversation, a shared document, or a five-minute email that opens a door. And when those connections are made, they don’t just deepen the learning – they remind students that knowledge is connected, not siloed.
Connecting knowledge across classrooms
In middle school, as students move from one class to the next, knowledge can feel fragmented. I often think back to that little patch of prairie we planted so many years ago. It started as a science project, but it grew into something bigger. We weren’t just planting seeds of purple coneflowers; we were planting seeds to forge deeper connections across disciplines. Showing students how ideas connect helps them make sense of the world – and their place in it.
And that is what the best education always does.
Lauren S. Brown (@USHistoryIdeas) has taught U.S. history, sociology and world geography in public middle and high schools in the Midwest. Lauren has also supervised pre-service social studies teachers and taught social studies methods courses. Her degrees include an M.A. in History from the University of Illinois at Chicago. You’ll find her newest work on her Substack, Lauren Brown on Education. Read all her MiddleWeb articles here.
