Purpose

Basic fenceline wall in Sherman, CT. NOte wooden fencepost in center, a common feature.

We present a collaborative, field-tested, innovative curriculum grounded in the transdisciplinary theory of teaching and learning.  The centerpiece of our curriculum (grades 3-5) is based on the illustrated childrens book Stone Wall Secrets, selected by the Smithsonian Institution as one of its Notable Books for Children. School Library Journal describes it as .....

Our teacher developed lessons integrate science, math, history, and literature in grades K-8 using stone walls less as an object to be investigated, than as the point of convergence for traditional discipines. For example, old stone walls are....

• Rock collections for students to explore earth history (Geology)
• Habitats for plants and animals living on, withn, and below the stones (Ecology)
• Ruins of culture history that can be used to interpet the past (Archaeology).
• Landscape objects with lines, angles, and dimensions (Geography)
• Samples of stones of different size and shape (Math)
• Historical markers that bridge modern life to the colonial and Yankee past (History)
• Evocative images that have inspired regional literature and poetry (Literature).

For more background on stone wall education and the transdisciplinary approach, read below :

STONE WALLS

The majority of children in the Northeast have not only seen stone walls, but have touched or crawled on them since they were first able to play outdoors.  This is true even in urban areas, where more carefully-built stone walls exist around cemeteries, parks and monuments.  More archetypical walls have been in the backdrop of their science-education field trips to ponds and nature preserves and their social science trips to living museums and historic places.  Yet few teachers know enough about geology to have the confidence to focus on the scientific phenomenon of the walls themselves or to weave these self-evident landforms into their lesson plans.

In 1998, Professor Robert Thorson co-authored the children’s book, Stone Wall Secrets, specifically to meet this need. The text explores the geology, culture, and ecology embedded within stonewalls. In the year of its publication, the Smithsonian Institution featured it as one of its Notable Books for Children, writing that the text offered “…passage to the realms of geology, history, and anthropology in a seamless, richly interdisciplinary narrative.”  Thorson’s celebrated work provides theover arching focus of the K-8 curriculum published in this website. 

However, the curriculum presented here pushes beyond an interdisciplinary approach to learning, coinciding instead with that of a transdisciplinary pedagogy, a described in a recent book by Dr. David Moss titled Beyond the Boundaries: A Transdisciplinary Aproach to Teaching and Learning. The combination of Thorson’s narrative of grandson and grandfather in an outdoor setting, combined with Moss's pedagogical approach, serves as as the ideal beginning with which to foster in students a transdisciplinary perspective of the world.

TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

You will find that the presented projects exemplify the core structure of the transdisciplinary curriculum . Because the pedagogy relies on the situational context and inquiry within specific communities, it would be difficult to reproduce them verbatim in another class.  Rather, their purpose is to illustrate the transdisciplinary theory in practice, thereby allowing developers insight into the process of creating such a curriculum in their own schools.  Thus, the lessons and activities here supply a starting point, but they must be adapated to reflect issues unique to various schools and comunities. We hope they serve as a model for bringing disciplines together in a way in which meaningful learning may occur.