Blogs on Integrated Studies

Perhaps more than anything else, the English Language Arts classroom is a place of diversity.

There is diversity of academic expectations for teachers. The ELA Common Core assigns literature and informational reading, writing, speaking/listening and language to what is usually a single "class." This is a total of five extremely broad topics, each of which could more than stand on its own as a content area.

Of the thousands of 18.5-year-olds that I've taught, some could not manage the challenges of college while others attacked higher education responsibilities with full uh-rah commitment. It is from observing the later group's mojo that I derived the following strategies.

As a junior in high school, I was finally able to enroll in the photography class. Offered only every other year, this was the only time the course was available to me (it was not open to freshman), and since there was only one section, the period three class was my only shot.

So, when my guidance counselor pulled me into his office on the second day of school to tell me I had to drop photography to take a more college-friendly Spanish class, I knew my opportunity was lost. This was in 1988, five years before Mosaic was introduced to the world, seven years before Netscape made the World Wide Web available to the masses, and a decade before virtual schooling was an option. Unless I could find a private mentorship, my only access to formally learning photography was period three during my junior year of high school and, since I had to take Spanish, that was no longer an option for me.

Among the highlights of the two weeks my wife and I recently spent exploring Bryce, Zion and other wilderness wonders of the Southwest, was watching a beaming little girl, about six or seven years old, get sworn in as a Junior Ranger by a National Park Ranger. That moment capsulized all the moments during the trip when we watched kids of all ages drinking in the trails and vistas. We were continually struck by how many happy, engaged kids we saw. This wilderness experience was clearly enriching for them and for their families. At the same time, it reminded me about the relative absence of these experiences from the lives of most kids, and about how little of this connection between children and the wilderness is cultivated by most schools.