Inspired by the Edinburgh Biodiversity Action Plan and the Fountainbridge Canalside Initiative (now the Fountainbridge Canalside Community Trust), this design for a problem-based interdisciplinary unit of work for secondary children offers opportunities for learner agency. Options are provided for a learner pathway that build on the foundational lessons introducing biodiversity within a problematised urban context.
This presentation, like others in the Natural Partners collection here on the IDL network, is part of a formative assessment activity in which peers, tutors and invited IDL experts are asked to provide advice and next steps guidance to students who will go on to trial aspects of their detailed IDL planning in a subsequent placement. You can see that in the penultimate slide in this particular deck. As the product of creative design and planning, these offer great ideas for other teachers seeking encouragement for their own implementation of the fourth context for learning in Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, currently under review. Following the Hayward report, it is expected that interdisciplinary learning will feature at least as strongly in Scotland’s schools into the future, engaging with sustainability and the demand for stronger critical skills in our citizens.
Teachers are welcome to adapt the designs in these outline units of work for their own planning of interdisciplinarity and learning for sustainability.