16/10/12 Making Content Connections

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Alaska Department of Education & Early Development

Making Content Connections

(from an essay by Dr. Michael Hartoonian)

Life is integrated. Unless we construct school programs upon this truth, we put our students at risk. We also
know that knowledge is culturally and historically determined. For example, the science of the 20th century is
quite different from the 16th century, and, no doubt, will be different from 21st century science. There are no
human views of reality except through cultural lenses. We must confront the fact that one cannot understand
knowledge or reality outside of the culture that defines who we are and how we view the world. Thus,
separating our science or our tools from our culture or separating our several bodies of organized knowledge
from one another and from the issues and problems they help us investigate leads us to half-truths and
disillusionment. If learning is to take place within school programs, the curriculum must be based upon an
integrated and coherent structure of meaning. And, since meaning is always rooted in culture, the quality of
that curriculum will be determined by how completely and accurately the models of knowledge reflect culture
and how well culture embraces knowledge.

Like life, knowledge is always changing. Over the last 50 years the construction of knowledge has taken on a
new texture and a new dimension that reflects its contemporary global context, its digital/electronic nature,
and its issue/problem orientation. Today, more than at any time in recent history, scholars identify themselves
by the issues, problems, or topics that they study. By definition, these topics or issues cross disciplinary lines
and appear as synthetic conceptualizations like bio-ethics, social mathematics, and global studies. In fact, the
official Library of Congress lists of subject headings contain dozens of entries like these: geochemistry,
economic ornithology, historical linguistics, psychoelectronics, and paleobiogeography. While we continue to
sort knowledge primarily according to the conventional subject disciplines, the walls between subjects are
becoming less clear.

In addition to the way in which scholars identify themselves, a second factor is changing the nature of
knowledge and that element is the computer. The computer has created a new scholarly community.
Knowledge now circles the earth in seconds, forming networks of scholars from different cultures who are
asking similar questions about the nature of the world and how it works. These trends are forcing educators
to think about knowledge in different and deeper ways; ways that focus on the common attributes of logic as
well as the subtleties of inquiry.

Scholars and students usually think about knowledge in the social studies curriculum in two different but
interrelated ways. First, knowledge is viewed as a story about continuity and change over time. That is,
knowledge is the narrative or analytical study of people, nature, events, and issues. Second, knowledge is
seen as a study or inquiry involving the creation, structuring, and use of content to better understand and
change self, and/or the world. Thus, knowledge is both an artful narrative and a set of assumptions, concepts,
explanations, and biases that reflect the common attitudes and craft of a community of scholars. A closer look
at academic disciplines such as science, mathematics, literature, and social studies reveals that they are all
constructed on notions such as narrative, change, continuity, chronology, cause and effect relationships,
evidence, and frame of reference. In other words, knowledge can be defined as narratives, stories, or symbol
systems that describe change and continuity over time. Scholars seek to explain this change and continuity

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16/10/12 Making Content Connections

through a series of cause and effect propositions based on evidence and shaped by their frame of reference.
Like students and citizens, scholars attempt to find out not only what happened but also why it happened,
what trends can be suggested, and how humans behave in certain social settings.
Some of the most important questions that they consider include:

How can a topic, issue, theme, or event best be conceptualized?

What defines an historical period?
What defines a theme?
What defines an issue?
What is a symbol system?
What constitutes primary and secondary evidence?
How can evidence be evaluated and used?
How are cause and effect relationships handled in narrative and discourse?

Some questions considered by scholars in assessing the merits of explanations include:

Is the logic of the explanation valid?

What biases or points of view seem to drive the narrative?
How well does the scholar place the story or study in temporal and spatial frameworks?
How well does the scholar explain the complexities of causal relationships within the given explanations?
How effectively is evidence presented to support interpretations?

The dynamic use of these questions and the concepts they embrace are fundamental to understanding inquiry
and integrating knowledge. That is, the way in which we think about and with knowledge is directly related
to the concepts and questions we use and to their relationship to one another. In most fields of inquiry, there
are several basic interrelated components of critical study involved in the construction and use of knowledge
regardless of the discipline field. These components constitute the necessary elements in thinking about
personal, social, and scientific questions and present a model for integrating content at a deep structural level.

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