Blog Post #3: The Challenges of Cross-Curricular Learning

Welcome back, everyone!

Cross-curricular learning has been proven to provide opportunities for students to develop transferable
skills, problem-solving abilities in relation to real-world applications, and a more positive mentality towards subjects. As mentioned in my last post, math can be a subject where students either love it, or hate it, and many students feel as though they “aren’t a math person”, but cross-curricular learning can help reduce this negative mentality. Although there are a great list of benefits of cross-curricular learning, there are also challenges or difficulties that teachers may run into when creating and incorporating cross-curricular lessons into their teaching.

    1. Additional Time and Preparation

As teachers, we know that lesson planning can be a time-consuming task. We teach three periods per day,
then we have to plan for three periods for the next day. This can be time-consuming, so integrating cross-curricular teaching can take more time and preparation to create and plan. Making authentic and genuine connections between various subjects and curricula can take time and thought, so a teacher may not be able to whip up a lesson for the next day. Cross-curricular lessons are well-rounded when created through collaboration with other teachers and resources, but this can be difficult and take more time and preparation than a typical lesson. Check out Munice Seçkin's article, or Matthew Lynch's article to read more on the challenge of time and preparation with cross-curricular learning.

    2. Teaching Content Beyond Teacher Expertise

In elementary schools, teachers are able to make connections between various disciplines easier because they teach different subjects throughout the day. Secondary teachers have specialized in their teachables, which means they define themselves with their expertise, and it can be difficult to teach content from courses that are beyond their subject areas. As a math teacher, I should be creating cross-curricular lessons to create applications surrounding science, geography, history, language, etc. The problem with this is that secondary teachers may not be confident in these other subject areas, and you don’t want to teach students something that contradicts what that specific course is teaching. This is why collaboration is very important to ensure you are gaining insight from teachers in that field (Kneen, 2020).

    3. Student Complaints of Content

You may hear students say “this isn’t math” while you are facilitating a cross-curricular lesson. Students are used to traditional math instruction, where they are presented with a concept, then asked to solve problems with the concept. We have to introduce the idea of cross-curricular learning as math within various contexts. We don’t want students to focus on simply the geography in a geography connection in a math class, we want students to understand that math can be found within geography, and work with the math in the context of a geography concept or situation. We may run into situations where students don’t like the content or connection between math and other subjects, especially if they dislike the other subject. If a student dislikes history, and you are facilitating a lesson with connections between math and history, the student may say “this isn’t math” or they may complain. Try to let students know that these cross-curricular lessons and connections to various subjects are to introduce math in different contexts and that there will be new problems tomorrow.

    4. Lack of Resources/Funding

In a math classroom, teachers have access to math resources and math textbooks for students. If a teacher
wants to create a cross-curricular lesson with art, it could be difficult to find the resources needed to fully engage students and create an authentic cross-curricular lesson. Making connections to science and STEM courses can be difficult when the resources are out of reach. Hands-on activities create an authentic lesson, as simply mentioning concepts from these courses may confuse students and just brush over the connections, rather than letting students explore the relationships. Nrich lists some more other obstacles and challenges with cross-curricular learning that you can find here.

Now that we have explored the pros and the cons of cross-curricular learning, we can begin to look for and create our own cross-curricular math lessons next week!

See you next week!

- Jenna