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