The Early Childhood Curriculum

Inquiry Learning Through Integration

Suzanne L. Krogh, Pamela Morehouse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367236106
• eBook ISBN: 9781000076370
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Now in a fully updated third edition, The Early Childhood Curriculum demonstrates how to confidently teach using inquiry-based methods that address the whole child while also meeting and exceeding academic standards.

Based on current research showing the powerful advantages of integrating the curriculum while providing inquiry opportunities, this text explores how to make such an approach work for all children, preschool through the primary grades. Since each curricular subject has its own integrity, there is a chapter for each discipline, grounding the reader in the essentials of the subject in order to foster knowledgeable and effective integration. Filled with real-life vignettes and activities, this third edition provides comprehensive information on the most recent trends in national curriculum standards and classroom technology, alongside a new section exploring the outdoors as a welcome learning environment.

Offering a foundation in early childhood theory, philosophy, research, and development, this unique textbook helps future teachers, as well as current educators, understand the "why" of curriculum in early childhood and invests them with the skills they need to move from simply following a script to knowledgeably creating curricula on their own.

Part One

Inquiry-Based Learning and Curriculum Integration: An Overview

Learning through inquiry begins at birth as infants explore their new environment and the people in it. Children learn more in their first few years of life than they will in any other development phase. They learn through continual inquiry and observation using all their senses, coupled with encouragement and modeling of adults and other children. Would it be worthwhile to adapt this model of learning by inquiry and observation to the school setting? Indeed, early childhood educators have traditionally held this view and provided their young charges with guided exploration using a curriculum that integrates subject areas. Despite the evidence that inquiry-based, integrated learning leads to maximum growth, there are often forces that work against such an approach. We are living in a time with an accountability movement that has led to widespread standardized testing and formulaic approaches to teaching even very young children. For many early childhood teachers, it is a struggle to maintain the kind of teaching they believe, observe, and know works most effectively for their eager and inquisitive young learners.

The primary purpose of this textbook is to demonstrate that such teaching can still be done. It is grounded philosophically in your authors’ belief that inquiry-based learning throughout the integrated curriculum is essential to preparing young children to live safely, productively, and harmoniously in a global community on a planet whose very survival is at stake. In the final chapter, we delve into this topic at some length, and you are invited to read the last chapter first if you like. (It won’t ruin the plot. We promise.)

In the first chapter of Part One, you will be provided with background information about inquiry learning and curriculum integration: current views and the history behind them. Chapter 2 discusses the importance of the classroom environment, not only the physical surroundings but also the social-emotional aspects of it, along with implications for teaching methods and classroom management. Assessment and evaluation are the topic of Chapter 3. Assessments—before, during, and after teaching—are critical to good curriculum development, but in today’s climate of high-stakes testing, these activities take on new and often stressful importance. Chapter 4 describes how themes and units can connect curricular subjects and the pros and cons of doing so. And finally, Chapter 5 discusses why student questions are vital to student learning and how such questions can facilitate learning connections. This chapter also provides the framework of an inquiry-based learning project along with the rationale for using inquiry learning throughout the integrated curriculum.

In each chapter, not only in Part One but throughout the book, you will encounter occasional invitations to consider that are related to the chapter’s content. These inserts also offer encouragement to ponder a topic more deeply. The first of these boxed invitations is termed “To Reflect On” and the second “Helpful Hints.” We hope that these brief insertions will help guide and enhance your teaching.

1

AN INTRODUCTION TO CURRICULUM INTEGRATION AND INQUIRY LEARNING

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

• Describe the historical events and people behind today’s early childhood education;
• Explain cognitive, social, emotional, and physical theories of child development and their sources;
• Define the concepts of integrated curriculum and inquiry learning and explain their importance to the education of young children.

The shallow inlet is dotted with small rocks begging to be handled as they lie gleaming in the warm, gray sand. The watchful fathers chat as a small boy and an equally small girl go about their discoveries. “Look!” the boy exclaims with excitement. “Look what I did with these rocks!” A parade of six rocks stands at attention in a line ranging from biggest to smallest. His friend, however, ignores him because she is busy with her own realization. When she slowly releases sand from her fist, it cascades and builds into a volcano shape, widening at the bottom, tapering at the top. She persists at her task as she tries to make the shape taller but finds the sand defies her expectations and just widens more at the base.

Through this playful experience, two inquisitive young children have each learned something, although it might be difficult to categorize into which school subjects their learning would fit. It would also be difficult to plan in advance the precise form their exploration should take or the specific learning goals appropriate to the experience. This is frequently the case with young children’s learning. It doesn’t fit into neat categories of subject matter; neither is it planned from start to finish by a teacher or curriculum design team; nor is it generated from a commercially “canned” program, and it may be advanced most effectively through what adults might dismiss as “just child’s play.” Yet this kind of learning may well be the most powerful for young children, and it is the primary focus of this book.

For an example of what this kind of learning looks like on a much grander scale, take a moment to enter Room 4’s Pet Shop. The Pet Shop was developed by a class of first-graders under the direction of a teacher well versed in promoting learning through inquiry.

Room 4’s classroom menagerie of worms, turtles, fish, frogs, and a rabbit was a continual source of wonder and amusement. These animals were also the catalyst for animated chats and questions students had about pets in their own homes or in homes of friends and relatives. The teacher observed the children’s interest in pets. After making a mental note of the various academic subject skills that could be integrated in a study of pets, the teacher proposed to the students that perhaps “pets” would be a good topic to pursue.

The children enthusiastically embraced the idea of discovering more about pets. However, after doing sufficient research on pets—after they ascertained, from various resources, the care pets need, what and how much they eat, pets’ different heights and weights, their degrees of friendliness, and so on—the young investigators enthusiastically declared that they were prepared to research pet shops as well. Through the course of the next week, the students, with guidance from the teacher, constructed a “What We Know About Pet Shops” chart, followed by a “What We Want to Find Out About Pet Shops” chart and a “Pet Shop Words” chart to use in their writings, in conjunction with their “Pet Verbs” and “Pet Adjectives” charts.

Figure 1.1 This “Pet Shop Words” chart was made from words and illustrations provided by the students.

Following a trip to the local pet store, where many of the student-generated questions and wonders about pets and pet stores were answered and addressed, the now pet-shop-savvy young learners constructed the “Room 4 Pet Shop” in a corner of their classroom. It took weeks to fine-tune the pet shop to be as realistic as possible. The completed shop included several sections: animal care products alongside student-produced brochures titled “How to Keep Your Pet Healthy and Happy,” animal food in varying sizes and weights in student-made cans and bags, “guaranteed-to make-your-pet-happy” student-designed pet toys and supplies, and an area with a cash register and a wipe-off schedule board for the pet shop workers.

Once the “Room 4 Pet Shop” was officially opened, the Room 4 students, as well as students from other classes, parents, the principal, and other school district personnel, would occasionally come to shop, peruse the merchandise, or seek information. Everyone—even some very happy pets—benefited from the kind of learning the Room 4 investigators used in order to find out more about pets and pet shops.

Figure 1.2 A partial glimpse into the “Room 4 Pet Shop.”

Young children are, by nature, curious about the world around them. Providing opportunities for them to inquire and explore will, therefore, generally engage their interest. It should be noted that the world around us does not frequently divide itself into curriculum segments such as math or science or social studies. More frequently, the world actually offers combined, or integrated, “curriculum subjects.” This indicates that, for young children (and for many older ones and adults as well), the most effective approach to enthusiastic and truly successful learning is one of using inquiry through an integrated curriculum.

When children are provided meaningful opportunities to use their curiosity and to pose questions in order to gain in-depth knowledge of a topic, it is termed investigative learning, inquiry-based learning, or simply inquiry learning. When skills from more than one curricular subject area are drawn together and connected in purposeful ways, it is called curriculum integration. This text emphasizes the ways that children’s natural curiosity, the backbone of inquiry, can be infused throughout academic subjects that have been combined, or integrated; thus, the text’s subtitle Inquiry Learning Through Integration.

Research in recent years has demonstrated the powerful advantages of integrating the curriculum while providing inquiry opportunities (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009; Helm, 2012; Hyson, 2008; Kostelnik, Soderman, Whiren, & Rupiper, 2019; Selmi, Gallagher, & Mora-Flores, 2015). At the same time however, without any reliance on research findings, state and national requirements have often moved schools, and even early childhood centers, in the opposite direction. In other words, as described previously, many educational programs are merely canned curricula, come from a curriculum design team, or follow teacher-made plans that offer no room for child engagement, direction, or creativity. Often, children can be found working in isolation on individual skills rather than working collaboratively on projects and activities that provide an opportunity to apply a wide range of skills.

Does any caring teacher—or parent, caregiver, legislator, governor, president—intentionally set out to badly educate children? Most assuredly, those who care about and for children have the best intentions when they make decisions about their education. Nevertheless, despite the findings of research, the best route to ensuring children’s school success is the subject of longstanding, and sometimes intense, debate. These debates are always a reflection of the political and cultural times and people’s responses to them.

In the following section, we give a brief history of the development of educational debates centering on how children, particularly younger children, learn best. But first, consider the following Reflection opportunity.

To Reflect On: Did your early school experiences include any projects such as The Pet Shop? If so, what did you find most memorable? Will such memories have any impact on your own teaching?

A BRIEF HISTORY

In his 1989 historical review of curriculum integration in American schools, Daniel Tanner referred to its development and acceptance as a struggle. Indeed, despite awareness on the part of many educators that this is the way in which children learn most naturally, such integration continues today to disappear from the curriculum more often than it appears, and so the struggle seems to continue.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, public schools focused primarily on providing children with the basic skills they needed to join the workforce brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The rise of laboratory schools connected to universities, particularly the one begun by John Dewey at the University of Chicago, brought about a major shift that had nationwide implications. Dewey’s view of providing basic public education for the workforce was that it fostered an elite, privately educated class and an underclass of the undereducated and uninformed masses. This situation, he argued, was untenable for a democratic society. The progressive and experimental education he introduced included an integrated curriculum that was related to real life, and it gained widespread popularity (Kostelnik et al., 2019; Mayhew & Edwards, 1966; Tanner, 1989).

Various interpretations of Dewey’s views eventually led to a watering down of a curriculum that should have been challenging and exciting. It was argued that Dewey’s progressive curriculum had been responsible for American education falling behind that of the Soviets, who were thus able, in 1957, to soar first into space. That and the desire for less tax support for schools by the end of World War II provided the push to return the curriculum to fragmented basics. Therefore, the argument continued, it was apparent that a much more basic elementary education was needed, along with specifically defined subject areas at all levels of education.

For about a decade, university scholars in mathematics and science focused on developing updated materials and curricula for children ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One Inquiry-Based Learning and Curriculum Integration: An Overview
• Part Two The Subject Areas
• Part Three Concluding Thoughts
• Index