Cross-curricular teaching is vital in primary education

Can science (IPA) and social studies (IPS) be merged and embedded into the core curriculum? Subject-oriented teachers, educators and pundits would insist that such integration is impossible. Nevertheless, this question has lingered around teaching professionals in the last three weeks.

 It is easy to forget that primary school teachers are class teachers. By profession, they are generalist educators, responsible for preparing children to be taught many subjects by secondary teachers later on in their education. Primary schools do not need subject specialists, because children’s learning does not fit into subject categories.

 As a matter of fact, what does happen in classrooms is complex. While content and target competencies can be standardized, it is not sensible to nationalize the styles and processes necessary to deliver the curriculum. Style is the teacher’s subjectivity factor, a unique art and is part of their personal competence.

 A distinctive characteristic of primary school education is cross-curricular teaching and learning. Being a generalist teacher is akin to being a cross-curricular teacher, moving from one topic to the next smoothly without causing cognitive distress on students.

 Considering their ages (6-12), what primary school students learn is not subjects as known in secondary schools and colleges, but rather topics or themes. Primary teachers should unlearn the conventional meaning attached to subjects. Instead, they should apply topics or themes, which are more friendly and palatable to primary school culture.

 The government seems adamant in excluding science and social studies from the core curriculum (religion, mathematics, Indonesian language and civics). However, it is grossly wrong to assume that primary students will be denied curiosity about and awareness of scientific and social phenomena.

 By comparison, in the United Kingdom, the core curriculum includes English, science and mathematics. After all, it does not mean that British primary students are not taught to be sensitive of social phenomena. The truth is that topics of social issues are integrated into the core curriculum.

 There must be ethical reasons for the Indonesian government to exclude them from its core curriculum. At primary school level, both science and social studies could be integrated and embedded to the core curriculum.

 What is pressing now is to define what constitutes the profession of primary teachers.

 There seems to be a need for intellectual conversion among teachers and policymakers regarding the function of primary education, particularly with regards to the imminent core curriculum.

 The current law on education breaks down teacher competence into four separate, yet interlocking, competencies; namely pedagogic competence, individual or personal competence, professional competence and social competence.

 By law, professional teachers are those who have those four competencies, including professional competence. Don’t you find something bizarre here, that professional teachers should have professional competence?

 The root of the problem goes back to the time when the bill drafters defined professional competence as parallel with the other three competencies. In other words, the word “professional” is a misnomer. It should, instead, be the umbrella competence subsuming all the four competencies.

 Reading world literature on teaching, you would find that professional competence is the super-ordinate, not a subordinate of the various competencies elaborated above.

 Granted, professional primary teachers are those who know how to teach all core subjects. Besides, they have cross-curricular competence to impart on students’ curiosity on various topics in science, history, geography, health, environment and so forth.

 Primary teachers are expected to be passionate about teaching children, master all the core subjects as well as the cross curricular topics and themes and in addition be able to communicate socially and professionally.

 Despite the so-called core curriculum, let’s stay away from content-led curriculum to a more productive curriculum by the following guiding principles. First, we should replace the thrust of content and objectives, with a concern for skills and processes. Naturally, primary students love play-based learning.

 Second, teachers should move from subjects and attainment to cross-curricular topics or themes and the affective domain. School environments are actually rich with unlimited topics and themes to explore. Newspapers, for example, report diverse day-to-day topics to deal with.

 Third, teachers should shift the emphasis from didactic teaching to self-directed learning. Students should be empowered to explore their curiosity about practically any topic and theme. In other words, we should think of the four core curriculum as the starting and central theme to explore other topics and themes.

 Fourth, to be good at cross-curriculum teaching, teachers must have the skills in class management, explaining, questioning, task setting and differentiation, as well as, increasingly, in assessment. Assessing a student’s mastery of subject matters is easier than mastering their understanding of cross-curricular topic.

 Let’s take baking as a teaching topic. Children will learn or develop aspects of speaking and listening (Indonesian), measurements of ingredients of flour, water and sugar (mathematics), how material change, say from separate substances into a cooked cake (science).

 Simple though baking looks like, professional teachers will do it with informed plan and with specific attainments in mind, namely to understand and use Indonesian as a means of communication, to develop mathematical understanding for real life, to learn scientific and technological understanding. In the final analysis, all of these are for the sake of human development, health and well-being.

A Chaedar Alwasilah ; 

A Professor at the Indonesian Education University Bandung, A Visiting Researcher at Christ Church University, Canterbury, United Kingdom

JAKARTA POST, 19 Oktober 2012

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