Relevant, challenging, integrative and exploratory curriculum design: perspectives from theory and practice for middle schooling in Australia

Integrative curriculum design, or student-centred curriculum integration, promises much for middle grades teachers wishing to develop classroom programmes that will encourage early adolescents to actively engage in their learning (Beane 1990, 1997). Integrative designs are highly responsive to the educational and developmental needs of young people. In contrast, student-centred multidisciplinary curriculum designs (Jacobs 1989) may result in significant but largely unrecognised drawbacks when they are applied to the middle grades. This paper critically examines the integrative and the multidisciplinary models of curriculum integration with respect to the educational and developmental needs of students in the middle grades. It draws its data from a doctoral study that traced a century of development of curriculum integration in the USA: from John Dewey's Laboratory School a century ago through to contemporary middle schools