Chapter 20: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Incorporating Social Issues into the Curriculum

For many years now, interdisciplinary learning has been cited as a powerful educational approach because of its impact on learning. A combination of social studies and literature, for example, allows for deeper understanding of historical events (for example, Mark Twain’s The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn provides remarkable and fascinating insights into slavery, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front provides unique insights into soldiers’ experiences fighting in the trenches during World War I, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath provides readers with a close-up view of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression).

Social issues are complex phenomena and do not simply involve one aspect of society. For example, the fact of global warming involves political issues (debates over the validity of such a phenomena, and debates between and within nations vis-à-vis the responsibility to avoid contributing to such), environmental issues (the actual impact that global warming has on the oceans, such as destroying the polar ice cap and killing off reefs that are instrumental in producing food for fish; land, such as causing extreme drought), and social ramifications (drought resulting in extreme famine). Quite obviously, the study of social issues naturally welcomes an interdisciplinary approach.