ABSTRACT
Throughout this book we have explored both the theory and practice of integrated curriculum to determine what it can contribute to the education of the child in the global world of the twenty-fi rst century. The outcomes of our investigations, as we have shown, are complex and multilayered. In several places in the book we have referred to the notion of a Worldly Perspective. We fi rst used the term ‘Worldly Perspective’ in a 2002 publication in Studies in Science Education (Venville et al. , 2002 ). This publication included a comprehensive review of the literature available at the time and drew on our experiences of examining a wide spectrum of teaching and learning contexts that involved integrated approaches to curriculum. An instrumental reason for our fi rst use of the term was that we wished to avoid describing what we were observing in classrooms in terms of a continuum from discipline-based approaches to integrated approaches. What we observed was a multifaceted approach to curriculum integration, including elements of the teaching and learning of discipline-based content knowledge alongside, before, after, and sometimes in the middle of integrated concepts and ideas. We wanted to capture the wonderful complexities of what we were observing and write about the diverse approaches to teaching and learning that were described by the teachers as integrated, without excluding the disciplinary components of what we saw. It also became clear to us that a perspective broader than either a discipline-based or an integrated perspective was needed to understand the diversity of what we were observing.
