Interleaving

 

INTEREAVING

 

              I saw this word in a posting I read today about something happening in classrooms and I immediately realized that it is a new way of referring to Integration.  When I was a classroom teacher, I automatically taught by integrating subjects.  We don’t learn history or geography as we are growing up and away from school. We learn about the world and its changes over time.  It is only when we are in school that it becomes first Social Studies and then History and Geography.  When we are studying music and learning how to read music we are confronted with terms like quarter and half notes but of course that has nothing to do with mathematics, right?  When I taught design in my art classrooms, I never thought to refer to patterning which is a strand on the mathematics curriculum.  We don’t think about subjects, we think about topics, or concepts whether they be from one area of a school curriculum or another.

              To help understand where I am going with this, think about browsing on the Internet. From the earliest days of the World Wide Web, students or most adults would sit in front of a computer screen and start in one location or web site and then perhaps click on another hot link which would take them somewhere else entirely, but it was the way their minds were working.  I might start reading about penguins living at the tip of South America but then I’d hit a link about Chile because all of a sudden something came to mind that I was interested in and so I’d click to find out and then I might read about the political situation while reading about Chile and find I was curious whether or not it was the same in Peru because I met someone who came from there.  Our minds follow our interests and our curiosities and if we are forced to NOT do that, some of us would lose interest because our minds are stuck somewhere else.  So, integration or InterLeaving follows the nature way in which we think which would mean it follows the way we learn, because we remember that which is of interest to us.  

              I always tried to integrate my teaching.  If I was teaching about flight, it was not enough to teach about the early experiments of the Wright Brothers, but to read about Daedalus and his attempt at flying and what the Greeks thought about attempting to fly and then to teach about birds and how come birds are able to fly and then about perhaps the principals of flight and then some history and the experiments and so forth.  By doing that, students are kept on their toes.  They are not just making notes, not just conducting experiments, not just reading books, not just watching videos, not just sitting in their desks.  AS I write this, you can perhaps see where the leaving part of InterLeaving comes from.  It is important to teach not according to subjects but according to themes.  That is how our minds work.

              Finally, one only has to think about the sciences that are now so important to our confrontation with the future. We talk about AstroPhysics, BioTechnology, 

BioChemistry, GeoPolitics and so forth.   Each of those began as separate fields of study, but we have come to see that, we cannot really understand one field without thinking about how it relates to other fields.  Interleaving is the way our world works and so too the way our classrooms should work.