“Mrs. Johnson, did you write these songs?” A curious fifth grader asked this
question during an integrated unit on the Civil War. For the first time, this student
understood that songs such as Dixie and When Johnny Comes Marching Home were not
written for music class, but instead are treasures left from an important time in the history
of the United States. Through integration, this class was able to connect music and
history in a way that they otherwise would not have. This was not the first time that the
students had sung these songs, but it was the first time that they questioned the origin
because there were no discipline boundaries.
There are many ways of integrating music into the general elementary classroom,
as well as techniques for integration during music class. The terminology surrounding
integrated learning is often difficult to understand and apply. For the purposes of this
project, integration refers to the “interaction among two or more different disciplines”
(Burton, 2001, p. 18). The terms integration and interdisciplinary are often interchanged.
Opinions surrounding integration differ greatly. Much of the debate is about
discipline based teaching versus integration or interdisciplinary teaching. Some
educators, both in music and in the general classroom, are of the opinion that it is integral
to keep the disciplines separated. On the other hand, many educators believe that
integration is the answer to numerous educational woes, including increasing knowledge
retention, making school more applicable to the student’s “real life” beyond the
classroom, and allowing for new exciting connections between disciplines. In addition,
there is a group of educators that believe that it is not necessary to choose integration
over discipline-based learning, but that there is room for both in the school day.