1: “To Dwell With a Boundless Heart”: On the Integrated Curriculum and the Recovery of the Earth (1990)

I began teaching my undergraduate early childhood education class this year by handing my students a blank piece of paper and instructing them to write down as many possible ways the paper could be used to demonstrate, illustrate, or teach features of the various curriculum areas. Their ideas began as expected, with possibilities such as writing on it, painting or drawing on it, reading from it, folding it and making shapes, questions of where paper comes from, how it is made and used, and so on. But in the midst of this exercise came a striking advent for this class. Once they moved to questions of how the paper was made, one student suggested that you could talk about trees and still remain “linked up” with the paper, still remain “on topic.” Once this shift of focus occurred, what began was a giddy onrush of sun and soil and water and logging and chainsaws and gasoline and refineries. Because of this serendipitous turn of attention, suddenly and unexpectedly, everything came to be co-present with the paper. Everything seemed to nestle around it. Some topics seemed close to the paper, others distant, at the ends of long and tenuous tendrils of interconnection. Some connections were obvious and immediate, some connections were stretched, but nothing was absent altogether.