Collaboration & Historical Fiction

Collaboration & Historical Fiction 

This article explored collaboration between Social Studies and English teachers around the context of historical fiction. In this experiment, Social Studies teachers used Historical Fiction in their classrooms to discuss topics in History while English teachers used Historical Fiction to learn about grammatical structures and writing forms. The educational theory it was exploring was the strengths of interdisciplinary collaboration. One of the ways I saw collaboration between all subject matter teachers play out in my schooling was during round robin activities in elementary school. When important holidays or special occasions came around, all four content area teachers would create an activity in which we travelled to the various classes in our grade level and learned about that occasion through the lens of the various subjects. For example, during Christmas, we would do Christmas-themed math problems, complete science experiments with red and green colored elements, read historical documents about past Christmas traditions around the world, and read texts about Christmas. Collaboration such as this is a good way to foster assimilation of knowledge for students because they are able to connect current knowledge with previous knowledge, as well as knowledge from other areas. The point of this article was to show readers that “collaboration is an important tool for literacy learning” (p. 26). However, my main concern after reading this article is what you do if and when other teachers are not on board with the same level of collaboration as you are expecting. I think collaboration with other teachers in varying content areas is important and beneficial. However, I am concerned about the logistics of it in my future classroom. I would love to read more about the logistics of using collaboration to inform my planning, but I definitely think collaboration can help improve learning in many subject areas.

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