Curriculum integration is a way of enriching learning and knowledge production by combining two or more subjects (Pountney & McPhail, 2017). This combination or integration of school subjects, asks teachers to consider not only what but also how content is taught (Pountney & McPhail, 2017). This blog post focuses on the ‘how’ of curriculum integration within international schools, exploring the methodological decisions around interviewing 25 teachers at nine different international schools across Germany and Switzerland. All of the schools subscribe to the International Baccalaureate (IB) curricula, a programme that mandates an integrated curriculum across the five grades within the Middle Years Programme (ages 11–16). Subject-specialist teachers from across different disciplines teach a part of this integrated curriculum culminating in a final, jointly marked assessment.

In order to explore the particular voice and agency of IB school teachers, semi-structured interviews were employed as the central data source. This is because the focus of this research is not merely on the curriculum itself but rather on the way that curriculum is enacted and developed, and the processes undertaken. Effectively, the teacher participants can ‘teach’ the researcher to interpret their particular feelings, perceptions, intentions, beliefs and rationales around decision-making and curriculum issues (Yin, 2015). Teachers were asked to define interdisciplinary learning, to discuss the place for subject-specific knowledge and to explain interdisciplinary synthesis. They also commented on the critical factors influencing curriculum – the challenges and obstacles as well as the factors that enabled them to work collaboratively to develop and ‘make’ the interdisciplinary curriculum.

‘Teacher participants can “teach” the researcher to interpret their particular feelings, perceptions, intentions, beliefs and rationales around decision-making and curriculum issues.’

While the interviews are used as the basis of this research, a case-study approach was not selected as a method. Even though case studies in schools often explore the relationships, interactions and processes used, this approach was not adopted because of the unwieldy nature of investigating nine different schools across two countries. Because of the time-consuming nature of case studies, and the intensity required to develop a detailed analysis, a case-study approach was rejected in favour of focusing on teacher voice and teacher perspectives, where the analysis will focus on themes and ideas, rather than individual schools. Viewing from this angle of teacher voice is an important aspect of this research because it is the words, thoughts and feelings of teachers that are being scrutinised (Brindley, 2015).

Ethnography was also not considered as a functional approach to this research. There are several reasons for this. Ethnographers immerse themselves within a particular space or institution as a way to observe, record and ask questions about the subject of their research (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Yet, ethnography typically focuses on a small number of cases, such as exploring a single school in an in-depth way, and this research will focus on nine schools, providing wider scope for generalisability (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007).

Furthermore, schools implement curriculum integration in a sporadic fashion, and it is usually not a practice that is part of the everyday curriculum. Such units are generally offered once a year, sometimes even in day or week-long programmes. Facilitating visits to schools during these specific times would prove to be highly challenging, costly and complex in terms of travelling around Germany and Switzerland. While an ethnographic study would certainly offer unique insights into particular incidences of curriculum integration, this research seeks to explore a wider range of teachers, rather than focusing on small, individual examples.

Consequently, what matters in this investigation is the voices, beliefs, thoughts and ideas of teachers negotiating curriculum integration in international schools. This research gives a voice to teachers who are responsible for the way that curriculum is ‘prescribed, described, enacted and received; or official, taught and experienced’ (Priestley et al., 2021, p. 14). Given that it is the teachers who interpret the curriculum at the institutional level, it is their lived experiences in this role as intermediary between the prescribed curriculum, the school institution itself and the classroom space, that makes up this research into the important influence that teachers have on curriculum integration in international schools.

References

Brindley, S. (2015). A critical investigation of the role of teacher research and its relationship to teacher professionalism, knowledge and identity [Doctoral thesis, UCL Institute of Education]. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10021762/  

Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (2007). What is ethnography? In Ethnography: Principles in practice (3rd ed). Routledge.

Pountney, R., & McPhail, G. (2017). Researching the interdisciplinary curriculum: The need for ‘translation devices’. British Educational Research Journal, 43(6), 1068–1082. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3299

Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S., & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making: A conceptual framework. In Curriculum making in Europe: Policy and mractice within and across diverse contexts (pp. 1–27). Emerald Publishing Limited.

Yin, R. K. (2015). Qualitative research from start to finish. Guilford Publications.