In an engaging, rapid-fire presentation, education consultant T. Roger Taylor presented ways to connect the curriculum through thematic, interdisciplinary approaches.
Taylor championed the concept of interdisciplinary common learnings for all students. Without common learnings, some students "spend their lives on the outside looking in," he said. Giving several examples of literary allusions in newspaper headlines, Taylor asked his audience to consider what people might conclude from the headline "No Joy in Mudville" if they had never read "Casey at the Bat."
Taylor pleaded with his audience to "never ever teach literature out of alignment with history. It is malpractice to do so." Moreover, he said, "history is the story of mathematical and scientific events that forever change all human activities. You cannot understand literature and history without math and science." To tie all these elements together, Taylor recommended several reference works that list thousands of songs, movies, novels, and poems that can enrich content and appeal to multiple intelligences. "You need at least four historical or scientific songs a week," he said.
Performance assessments can also make connections among disciplines, Taylor noted. He told a moving story of a student, Clyde, who was so shy that he couldn't talk to Taylor without staring at the floor. For his term project, Clyde wanted to do a puppet show of the Lincoln-Douglas debate.
On the day of Clyde's performance, Taylor arrived at school to find Clyde already there, under a table that was part of a small puppet theater. "I wanted to come early to make sure my show was good," Clyde apologized. He had created stick puppets of Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln.
The performance was "incredible," Taylor said. "It was perfectly synchronized." A 20-minute soundtrack of music that might have been heard in 1859 accompanied it, including sound effects—people talking, coughing, someone playing a jaw harp, horses whinnying, carriages passing—in surround sound.
Clyde did not see the standing ovation he got from his classmates because he would not come out from under the table. But Taylor videotaped the performance, put it in Clyde's portfolio, and sent a copy to Steven Spielberg's Industrial Light and Magic Company. Not long after, Clyde received a phone call from Spielberg, inviting Clyde to meet with him and George Lucas. Clyde is now on a four-year, Spielberg-Lucas full scholarship at Northwestern University, studying stage management, set design, and puppetry, with a signed contract to be a puppeteer upon graduation.
"I don't think that would have happened if the only way to show your [learning] had been a nice third-person paper, amply footnoted, with the appropriate punctuation," Taylor observed.