Hello Poon,

It is becoming increasingly important to ignore the main goal of  educational system in  teaching our learners to turn into  critical thinkers by acquiring the skills, which play a crucial role in modern communities. It is suggested that  integrated

curriculum can pave the way for creating  critical thinking in students and helping them to  engage in their own learning. An integrated curriculum or interdisciplinary curriculum is a kind of curriculum in which relevant sources of content from various domains are combined  cutting across subject-matter borderlines and emphasizing unifying concepts. Notably, the main function of such  integration is to enable students to  in engage  in relevant, meaningful learning tasks helping them connect to real life situations concerning their own lives and the world. This requires the accommodation of  cooperative learning and  problem-solving skills as an essential part of the curriculum. For more information, the following link can hopefully satisfy the main issue- that is, the characteristics of an integrated curriculum.

Best of luck,

R. Biria

https://webmedia.jcu.edu/cas/files/2014/.../Kysilka-Understanding-Integrated-Curriculum.pdf

I wouldn't exactly put it that way. Integrated curriculum may not necessarily have some preconceived characteristics in as much as it focuses on conceptual relationships of different areas of human development as ell as it requires broad perspective of the experienced teacher. Such a teacher can relate the subject matter under discussion to various areas of human development, thus making it interesting and easy to understand by students from the varied backgrounds.

Linking the subject matter provokes new and intriguing thoughts which would otherwise stay buried in the heads of the learners or otherwise overlooked. In addition to critical thinking it promotes respect for different branches of knowledge which otherwise are not considered important,  

Stephen:

A very relevant question! We need strategies like an integrated curriculum to help develop a more rounded individual coming out of our universities. I can share one strategy I use in my teaching that has been very successful in developing learners' critical thinking is debating. I hope the link below can be of some help to your topic.

Many thanks,

Debra

Conference Paper Debating: A Dynamic Teaching Strategy for Motivating Student...

Chapter Asynchronous Debates - Chapter 10 Contribution (p, 154)

Good Question.

In medical and health sciences we are following World Federation of Medical Education (WFME) standards, which are the following:

1. Mission and outcomes

2. Educational programme

3. Assessment of students

4. Students

5. Academic staff/faculty

6. Educational resources

7. Programme evaluation

8. Governance and administration

9. Continuous renewal

I believe one characteristic that would promote engagement would be inquiry.  Have you considered various approaches to inquiry? For example, one way to do this is to just present the topic and ask students to reflect on what they know and are curious about involving the topic. If they start with questions that can be answered factually, it's important to move them toward more conceptual questions that integrate other subject matters. 

Another way is to present them with factual, conceptual, and debatable questions AND with questions that link the topic with other subject matters for an integrated approach. 

Integrated curriculum is described as one that connects different areas of study cutting accross different learning areas and different subject matter but manifesting or giving emphasis on a unified idea. It is also focused on making connections thus providing the learners with relevant and meaningful activities that is needed in resl life. Repetition of skills being taught creates a higher level of understanding and retention to learnes. This also help teachers to provide students with an exciting classroom that will hook the needs and interestof the learners.

For me, the word relevance best describes what we try to do in integrating curriculum pieces. We want our students to think more critically, move up on the Bloom's Taxonomy Chart, and ultimately see the big picture. An analogy I like to use with students is to ask them to visualize a tall building, surrounded by like ones, in the center of a major city. On the lower levels of such buildings, our outside view is restricted, but as we move to upper levels in the building, our outside view gets better, and when we reach the roof top of the building, we can see the entire city from all directions; we get the big picture; we can better evaluate. A number of teaching strategies can help students get to the point where they can now evaluate/apply what they have learned. Obviously encouraging students to preview/pre-read background assignments before coming to class better prepares them to participate in hands-on and problem-based learning when they are in class. Activities that promote  and reinforce memory retrieval, like concept maps and team-based learning, allow students to distinguish between what they really fully understand and what they don't. Growing student reflection skills through writing and analyzing experiences holds much potential in the integrated curriculum. The icing on the cake is that students not only learn to think more critically, but they see the relevance of the curriculum pieces, and they enjoy the process of connecting the dots!

rom my point of view, critical thinking can be stimulated by disrupting the student's thinking scheme, or by confronting new knowledge with the student's own experience. That is, to stimulate learning to learn or to work on the lateral thinking proposed by Edward de Bonno

Dear Stephen and all the participants:

Well, that is a good research question that easily could be a PhD thesis project. 

First, I'd like to add that integrated curriculum is neither a method nor a strategy. An integrated curriculum is a huge collective and social project that aims to educate people in several aspects, including the development of crucial competencies such as critical thinking, in order to contribute to the construction and transformation of society. 

Giving a first insight, the characterisctics of an integrated curriculum could be:

• A robust conceptual and theoretical framework that makes explicit the purpose of the project, for instance, the competencies they want to develop.
• It needs effective communication strategies among academic and non-academic stakeholders
• It requieres a continuos and permanent curricular evaluation process.
• It is based on Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity

Another thing to consider is that the development of critical competence needs the development of other competencies such as systemic thinking competence, prospective competence, ethical competence, and so on. These competencies give orientation to the purpose of the curriulum. 

I think that students cannot be critical thinkers if they have not developed to a certain level their systemic thinking competence. Fo example, in the case of sustainability, students must be able to approach and conceptualize processes of production and consumption of food linking oil extraction to food waste, making explicit all the connections among systems that intervene in this whole process.

I know there are not simple answers but that is my contribution to your question.