The Oregon Trail means more when kids have lived it!
In today's dynamic global economy, centered on the development and exchange of knowledge and information, individuals prosper who are fluent in several disciplines and comfortable moving among them. Creativity, adaptability, critical reasoning, and collaboration are highly valued skills. When it comes to fostering those skills in the classroom, integrated study is an extremely effective approach, helping students develop multifaceted expertise and grasp the important role interrelationships can play in the real world.
Click here to see a slide show of how my family deals with education on the road!
I was browsing the Edutopia site the other day and stumbled upon this article about Integrated Studies. The article went on to talk about how indisciplinary studies help students in many ways including:
- Increased understanding, retention, and application of general concepts.
- Better overall comprehension of global interdependencies, along with the development of multiple perspectives and points of view, as well as values.
- Increased ability to make decisions, think critically and creatively, and synthesize knowledge beyond the disciplines.
- Enhanced ability to identify, assess, and transfer significant information needed for solving novel problems.
- Promotion of cooperative learning and a better attitude toward oneself as a learner and as a meaningful member of a community.
- Increased motivation.
Although the teacher part of me was fascinated by the “factual-ness” of the article, the roadschooling parent side of me simply shrugged my shoulders and said, “ I already knew that! We do exactly that all the time, every day, everywhere we are.”
I think the beauty of roadschooling is that our lives are an integrated whole. We live together with our children and can teach them naturally. Our children see how we handle all the ins and outs of life – not only those we experience during our “at home” hours. They see how we handle problems, how we maneuver out of tight spots, and how we cope when things go wrong. They celebrate success with us and commiserate failure.
Our children also learn “real life” applications including all the “subjects” of school. Our children experience – on a daily basis - “the varied ways in which any of us acquire knowledge and apply skills in the experientially kaleidoscopic real world.”
After all, our daily life and work are not stratified into "the math part, the science part, the history part, and the English part," Rosenstock points out. "Kids don't experience the world that way." Instead, they -- and all of us -- live in a truly interdisciplinary fashion.
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You might also be interested in these other articles about roadschooling:
Roadschooling: Are health care concerns holding you back?
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