The purpose of this study was to provide a full description of five levels of curriculum integration at the middle school level, grounded in practice and described by practitioners through a multiple case study approach. This study focused on these research questions: (1) How does curriculum integration at each reference point on a synthesized continuum occur according to selected middle school interdisciplinary teams of teachers? (2) What is the nature of the interactions of an interdisciplinary middle school team of teachers at each level on the synthesized continuum? (3) How do interdisciplinary teams of middle school teachers progress from one stage of curriculum integration to another? (4) What are the barriers and facilitating factors to curriculum integration encountered by middle school interdisciplinary teams of teachers? / The conceptual framework for this study was based on a synthesized continuum of curriculum integration derived from Faunce and Bossing's (1958), Vars' (1987), Jacob's (1989) and Fogarty's (1991) continuums or models of curriculum integration. The five levels on the revised synthesized continuum included: Departmentalized, Reinforcement, Complementary, Webbed, and Integrated Learning. / The methodological approach was naturalistic inquiry with qualitative data collection and analysis strategies. One middle school interdisciplinary team at each of the five levels of curriculum integration on the synthesized continuum was purposefully selected to participate. Sources for data collection included documents, interviews, observation, and artifacts. The constructivist paradigm was the framework through which the data was collected and analyzed. The data analysis was conducted using content analysis and analytic induction. / In addition to telling each team's story of curriculum integration and refining a rough definition of each level, common themes from the five teams emerged. Common themes such as "torch bearers" are crucial to curriculum integration occurring, the amount of "curriculum conversations" which occurs improves the productive outcomes of common team planning time, and maintaining the composition of working teams longer than a year increases the occurrence of curriculum integration were the results. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-07, Section: A, page: 2230. / Major Professor: Judith L. Irvin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76683 |
| Contributors | Schumacher, Donna Helen., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 428 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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