From Supermarkets to Kitchens.

The Inderdisciplinary Chef

Some people find the organization of supermarkets efficient. As I grow older and more forgetful, I find it confusing. Recently, I was looking for a jar of marinated artichoke hearts. I found fresh artichokes in the produce section, frozen artichokes in the frozen food aisle, and artichoke hearts in water in the canned vegetable aisle. But I could not find the marinated variety. Like most men who never stop to ask for directions when driving, I don't like to ask for directions in the supermarket. In this case, I thought I could figure it out. So I checked out the pickle aisle, the refrigerated section, and the pasta sauce section before I realized that my problem-solving skills were flawed and I was inept at making connections. Reluctantly, I approached an employee. "Where can I find marinated artichoke hearts?"

"Check in Ethnic Foods, about halfway down aisle 6." Sure enough, that's where they were, right next to chickpeas. It made me wonder, "Who decides what's ethnic?"

When you stop to think about it, the traditional school curriculum is structured much like a supermarket. In the supermarket you find fresh peas in aisle 1, frozen peas in aisle 10, canned peas in aisle 3, dried peas in aisle 7, and chickpeas and pea flour in aisle 6 with ethnic foods. In schools, you go down the hall for gym, up the hall for music, across the hall for math and science, next door for language arts, and stay in your homeroom for social studies. For art you go down to the basement, and for recess you go outside in the freezing cold.

That, of course, is in a traditional school setting where disciplines are segregated--separate and unequal. Each component is taught in a separate course, and some courses meet more frequently than others. Each is treated as a separate community of interest.

Schools with a more integrated curriculum might be more akin to specialty food shops, where produce and packaged goods are still separate, but appear to be attended to within a community of common interest or theme. You have a theme to hold each of the separate discipline components together. It's sort of like peas in a pod.

In the kitchen, when you add the peas in a pod to a stir-fry, along with carrots, mushrooms, and celery, each ingredient maintains its individual shape and identity while contributing to a unified whole. Each piece is an integral part of the stir-fry, flavoring the whole while remaining recognizable. An amalgamated curriculum design, in which theme-based units are constructed with concepts drawn from several disciplines, is similar to a stir-fry.

And then there's split pea soup! Peas, carrots, and onions lose their individual identities as the parts become fragmented and diffused in a new organic whole. This is not unlike what happens in some approaches to interdisciplinary teaching. Small parts of several disciplines are taught in a pleasing project or activity. But when split pea soup gets watered down, the really rich stuff settles to the bottom of the bowl and we never get to it.

In the gourmet kitchen, it's possible to create exciting new dishes by giving components new identities and infusing them into healthy and flavorful presentations. Our chickpeas can be ground into pea flour and used as a thickening ingredient for an exotic artichoke sauce. I'd like to think that it's possible to do the same thing with an interdisciplinary curriculum. Like good chefs who know how to select the best ingredients, which vegetables take longer to cook, and which flavor enhances another, the interdisciplinary team can infuse units of instruction with meaningful art concepts at the appropriate time. When selecting these concepts, the key is to focus on the structure of the discipline, the nature of the art experience, the functions of art, themes in art, and the cultural context.

Perhaps some of the articles in this month's issue of SchoolArts can help us to see and make connections for lifelong learning.