Thinking Approach to Interdisciplinary Experience by Hope Irvine

For those planning interdisciplinary units of instruction, this book is an excellent resource. It provides background, examples, a hands-on sample, and it highlights programs that do not work. Save the time of trial and error and the risk of failure involved in re-inventing the wheel.

• Examines personal knowledge of ordinary things and introduces the complexity of how we learn. From this introspective analysis, ten categories of knowledge emerge and are presented as operational definitions.
• Explores relationships between verbal and visual language as surrogates for experience, and the process of learning and communicating what has been learned.
• Explains the method of interactive diagramming with step-by-step examples to determine scope and sequence of interdisciplinary experiences.
• Guides the development of a unit on time, followed by twenty-five examples of interdisciplinary approaches.
• Cites difficulties in developing interdisciplinary programs in schools with suggestions for solving the problems.