The tragic and needless loss of biodiversity and the threat of extinction of potentially a billion species is alarming. Sir David Attenborough closed ‘Extinction: the facts’ with an optimistic tone, “what happens next is up to every one of us”. What could this mean for Education and the Curriculum?
Subject disciplines such as Geography may traditionally ‘cover’ some of the issues raised in the BBC documentary. For example, AQA GCSE Geography mandates discrete units on Climate Change, Ecosystems – leading to content on Tropical Rainforest deforestation and desertification. Curriculum, lessons and pedagogies can often be one dimensional, using a know-do approach to instruction. A Geography lesson may include the cause of climate change in one lesson, jump to the impacts in the next and there we end.
This shallow, sequential and assessment orientated approach to curriculum does not lend itself to a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of our world. For today’s learners to have a deeper understanding of how the world works there must be a three dimensional approach, facilitating a deeper exploration and understanding of relationships at ever increasing levels of scale. One route we can take to help foster this is taking an interdisciplinary approach (IDL), weaving together knowledge from the disciplines in a unified study to recognise complexity, and enable a deeper understanding. We argue that we must take this further, drawing interdisciplinary threads together to a central anchor point, that of Concepts.
The Concept-driven approach to curriculum is epitomised by the programmes of the International Baccalaureate, yet the approach does not call for the establishment of unifying Concepts, as we advocate. We recognise that a Concept is ‘An organizing idea/mental construct’ abiding by 6 principles:
- Timeless
- Universal
- Abstract
- Represented by 1 word
- Not a verb
- Examples share common attributes.
- Substantive concepts: these are part of the ‘substance’ or content knowledge in a subject.
- Second-order concepts: these shape the key questions asked in a subject and organise the subject knowledge.
- Threshold concepts: once understood, modifies learners’ understanding of a particular field and helps them to make progress.
So one way of understanding complexity in the natural world could be to begin with the Macro Concept of ‘Systems’. We can begin to think across the academic disciplines so that information, processes and concepts nested within Geography, the sciences, economics, politics and engineering for example can be connected. Identified and taught nested concepts become embedded in schema; facts and content become contextualised and purposeful. The devastating local and global impacts of deforestation can be understood through systemic understanding. Nutrient cycling and hydrological systems must be understood not within stand alone topics but cleverly integrated and connected within the umbrella problem and Concept. Further understanding is achieved by explicitly connecting the Concept of Systems to the human complexities of global trade, food prices and uneven wealth distribution.