Harvard Project Zero

Interdisciplinary learning comes with many challenges and rewards. It is one of the more difficult educational concepts to apply in a school setting: it requires a change of thinking in educators, a reorganization in school planning, and a challenge to assumptions of students, teachers, and families. Yet it has the potential be a transformative experience, changing the perspective, identity, and understanding of both the learner and the teacher.

One of the biggest challenges is the question of what is ‘interdisciplinary’; what does it mean, what does it look like? Does it mean to study the same topic co-taught between two subjects? To write an essay and grade it twice in two subjects? To collapse subjects completely and abandon disciplinary understanding? These lead to the question of what is the purpose and mode of integration.

Harvard’s Project Zero explored the question of the purpose and modes of integration with the Project Zero Interdisciplinary project. The result informed the IB guides "MYP Guide to Interdisciplinary teaching and learning" and "Fostering Interdisciplinary teaching and learning in the MYP".

Along with Humanities and Media teachers of grade 7 (MYP Year 2), I contributed to action research on interdisciplinary teaching. The unit, "Ancient Civilizations", was accepted by Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. 

The interdisciplinary methodology used included "Complementary connections" and "Crossover Tooling"; developing tools that link the skills within one subject to another to connect learning. This maintains the foundational structure of the disciplines while students learn a skill or concept that can be used in multiple disciplines and apply it to understand a new issue or problem.

The History topic included the development of civilizations, the Geography topic included organization of society and place and space, the library and media focused on research and communication using multi media. Below is a copy of the action research manuscript submitted to Harvard.

The full manuscript can be seen here

Action Research on Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning: Ancient Civilizations


Below, the acceptance letter from Harvard University.