ABSTRACT
Creating meaningful learning means conceptualising learning so the examples resonate as far as possible with individual students, drawing from their prior and/or current experiences. This has huge potential as relevance becomes more meaningfully demonstrated and is better retained. Cross-curricular links assist students in understanding the transferability of learning in one subject to another and hooks them in. Students benefit from these signposts in their understanding of where the subject aspects sit, through the wider acquisitions of concepts; once again, capturing the whole mosaic of knowledge, rather than its parts.
We contend that cross-curricular concepts and skills create memorable learning –the ‘Eureka moment’(the Threshold Concept)assists students in retaining and applying what they have learnt over time.
Using a visual graphic organiser, such as an Octoweb, is memorable as it makes the connections within a subject and across subjects. Whenever possible, learning should be a meaningful experience and one that arouses students’ curiosity and hooks them in through relevance and the ‘Eureka moment’. This can only happen if students are required not to simply list information that is interrelated but to draw out the key concepts that go beyond the detail.
