Integration of the DisciplinesThe Bank Street Workshops (1943-1948): Teacher Education for Curriculum Development
The Bank Street Workshops were designed to take the principles and practices of curriculum from the Bank Street College of Education into the public schools. The Bank Street College of Education developed out of the Bureau of Educational Experiments, founded in 1916 by Lucy Sprague Mitchell to try to bring together the movement toward building experimental schools with the movement toward developing a science of education (Cremin, 1964).
The purpose of the first workshop, in 1943, was to work with teachers in their school, with their children, in their physical and social neighborhood, and in that concrete situation to work with them realistically to build a curriculum suited to children in modern-day United States (Mitchell, 1950). For the first 3 years, three of the Bank Street staff worked intensively with about half the teachers and three of the administrators in a large urban elementary school of some 1,700 students. The curriculum was revised twice during the Workshop experience, with increasing involvement and ownership among the teachers. In 1946, the program was expanded to two additional schools, and three teachers from the original school were assigned to work full-time with the Bank Street team in the new Workshops.
The Integrated Curriculum in the Bank Street Workshops
In the first workshops, teachers did not understand the when, where, how and why of curriculum integration. According to Martinello & Cook (1994), they liked the idea of units as experiences in which content from various areas of the curriculum might be used, but they perceived the units as some thing to be added onto the regular course of study.
Social studies was deliberately selected as a starting point in the curricula since the subject area appeared to lend itself most readily to student involvement and social interaction. History, geography, and civics were part of the new social studies. The study of science was then added to the curriculum.
Major themes were identified for different grade levels:
Each of these are still patterns and units commonly found in elementary social studies curricula.
Later in the workshops, teachers explored with Bank Street ways in which activities in dramatic play, art, language, music, and other subject grew out of the core experiences. However, it is important to note that the workshops never concentrated on designing and implementing a fully integrated curriculum. The emphesis of second phase workshops was on building a pedigogically sound vertical social studies curriculum rather than a horizontal curriculum which broadens the curriculum across subject.
In the earliest phases of the workshops, the teachers were interested in how to implement the new ideas, not in the underlying philosophy or assumptions about children and learning. According to Martinello & Cook (1994), during the second phase, there was an important shift in the teacher approach to curriculum building. And after 3 years in the workshop,teachers began to see how knowledge of children's development of the environment, and of a basic philosophy of education, were the essential knowledge bases or foundations for curriculum development.
Throughout the Bank Street Workshop experiment, teachers went through the following stages of professional growth:
The Findings
As the teachers developed more self-confidence in their own ideas and their ability to work creatively with children, their professional attitude changed. They became enthusiastic, inventive, and willing to experiment. They obtained deep satisfaction from their creative endeavors (Mitchell, 1950).
Also according to Mitchell (1950), although they became increasingly impatient with the strictures and limitations of public school teaching, they became better equipped to deal with these problems and to develop authentic learning environments for their students.
