25/07/19
Celia Fleck is a Ministry of Education accredited PLD facilitator working for Future Learning Solutions. She is the President/Chair of Physical Education New Zealand – Te Ao Kori Aotearoa. Her current role includes working to support health and physical education curriculum planning and delivery in primary schools, and connected curriculum design in secondary schools. From 2013 to 2015 Celia lead the Sport in Education Project at Aotea College while she was HOD Health and Physical Education; since 2016 she has overseen the project nationally across 25 secondary schools.
In this blog, Celia explains the importance of making connections in your local curriculum and offers practical suggestions on how you can connect your learners to the health and physical education learning area.
The concept of connection is a powerful one. The idea that if we can link with someone, somewhere, or something, it will make us stronger. One of the Five Ways to Wellbeing is to Connect – Me Whakawhanaunga.
This concept can be equally powerful if we embrace it in the design and delivery of our local curriculum. The New Zealand Curriculum (2007) gives schools the mandate to make connections within and across learning areas, with local contexts, community, and the wider world. References to connections are made throughout the document:
Coherence
“The curriculum offers all students a broad education that makes links within and across learning areas, provides for coherent transitions, and opens up pathways to further learning.” (p 9)
Learning areas
“All learning should make use of the natural connections that exist between learning areas and that link learning areas to the values and key competencies.” (p 16)
Effective pedagogy
“Teachers can help students to make connections across learning areas as well as to home practices and the wider world.” (p 34)
School curriculum design and review
“Schools may… decide to organise their curriculum around one of these three aspects (values, key competencies, or learning areas) … Alternatively, they may decide to organise their curriculum around central themes, integrating values, key competencies, knowledge and skills across a number of learning areas … The values, competencies, knowledge and skills that students will need for addressing real-life situations are rarely confined to one part of the curriculum. Wherever possible, schools should aim to design their curriculum so that learning crosses apparent boundaries.” (pp 37–38)
There are a wide range of views as to what curriculum integration could look like, with very little consensus, and a lot of confusion, about what curriculum integration is or isn’t. What can be agreed upon is that “…learning is more relevant and meaningful if it is organised around concepts that are relevant to students.” (Boyd and Hipkins, 2012).
For that reason I have moved away from using the term "curriculum integration" and have replaced it instead with the term "connected curriculum". This seems to make the concept far more accessible for teachers, and has given them permission to approach it in a way that best suits them, their learners, and their school communities, without fear that they are doing it wrong.
Over the last seven years I have experienced and observed many positive impacts of connected curriculum on staff and students; these have also been captured in the NZCER evaluation of the Sport in Education Project, and by others who have studied and observed connected curriculum in action.
The health and physical education learning area has been marginalised over recent years due to an increased emphasis on reading, writing, and maths. By connecting health and physical education to other learning areas we can make more time for young people to be active, while allowing each area of knowledge and skills to support learning in the other.
Picture books can be used as a provocation for movement experiences; exploring the movements described in the story can enhance language use and comprehension. For example, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen can be used with younger students to explore different ways of moving over, under, and around things, as well as ways of moving our bodies to make or represent different sounds. The same picture book can be used by older primary school students, as inspiration to create an obstacle challenge to represent different aspects of the story.
Students can create movement related games that link to an aspect of a story, then complete a writing task to write the instructions and rules for the game. By teaching the game to other students they develop their ability to verbally explain rules.
Traditional Māori games provide a rich learning context to connect multiple learning areas:
In health and physical education students can:
In English students can:
In mathematics and statistics students can:
In learning languages students can:
In my role as a PE facilitator I have seen schools make connections to health and physical education in multiple ways.
In a Catholic primary school the overarching focus for the term was on human dignity, which was then narrowed down to community wellness. Looking through the lens of hauora, and using the Te Whare Tapa Whā model, the school looked specifically at whenua, the foundation of the whare. Teachers wanted students to understand that the four dimensions of wellbeing need a solid foundation to be built upon, and linked this to the idea that the community is the foundation (the whenua).
They looked at how they could honour community members and uphold their human dignity, so everyone can feel good and the foundation of the community is strong.
Through physical education the children experienced a variety of games that they modified to make more inclusive, based on the needs of participants. A link with the social sciences was made by exploring the context of soldiers in the trenches during the war and identifying gaps in their basic human needs. This then linked to the technology curriculum as students created prototypes of things that would improve the wellbeing for soldiers – vehicles to carry supplies, rat traps, water drains, and carts to carry injured animals. As part of their religious education the students read the Bible story about the man who built his house upon the rock, and they examined the importance of a strong foundation linking back to whenua in the Te Whare Tapa Whā model.
At an intermediate school a class was exploring the use of feedback and feedforward to improve performance in long jump. They completed a statistical inquiry – gathering data, graphing results, and evaluating data – and used this information to provide feedback and feedforward to improve technique.
The students looked at comparing individual performance with that of a professional athlete to identify ways to improve performance.
The teacher also described links with the key competencies, as she found students were enthusiastic, self-motivated, highly engaged, and had a degree of student agency.
In a secondary school a group of cross-curricular teachers had chosen the US Tennis Open as their context for a connected programme of teaching and learning.
The maths teacher was struggling to connect with the context. When the "why" was unpacked a little more it became evident that the reason students had chosen the US Tennis Open as a context of interest was because the girls were particularly interested in gender equality (the US Tennis Open being a tournament that has prize pay parity). Once the concept of equality and inequality was surfaced, this then became the connection for the learning areas, with the maths teacher in particular finding this to be a far more authentic way to connect.
Hobsonville Point Secondary School (HPSS) in designing their school curriculum, identified eight concepts that link to all curriculum areas:
These concepts could be useful as a starting point in planning to connect curriculum areas. HPSS have found that when courses are created using authentic connections between learning areas, learning and achievement in each area is enhanced by the other. For example, in a combined level 2 NCEA health education and mathematics and statistics course:
Knowing where to start can seem quite daunting and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to designing and planning for a connected curriculum. The following questions could serve as a useful guide in generating some rich ideas:
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Leading local curriculum guide series
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Fraser High School – Curriculum integration
Teaching and learning has been revitalised at Fraser High School through curriculum integration and the use of authentic contexts.
