Abstract:

The goal of education is undoubtedly the development of a versatile person with a holistic view of the world around him/her. Due to technological advances, today’s learners have plenty of information at their disposal. In these circumstances, the ability to interrelate information becomes one of the core competencies that learners need to develop. This can be achieved through an interdisciplinary approach that removes the strict boundaries between school subjects and in which the learning content and natural phenomena are studied integratively and from a multi-faceted perspective, similar to how they occur in nature. To achieve a true understanding of natural laws and phenomena, i.e. the nature itself, it is necessary that learners possess knowledge from multiple disciplines, as single-discipline knowledge cannot offer this. For example, the study of complex concepts, such as the adaptability of living organisms to the conditions of their habitat, cannot provide a complete understanding of the concept if a monodisciplinary perspective is applied (e.g. from the aspect of biology only). It requires the integration and synthesis of biological knowledge and concepts related to environmental conditions, i.e. geographic space, which falls within the scope of the subject of geography. This points to the necessity of correlating teaching and learning contents of various school subjects and disciplines. Only through such a correlative-integrative approach will the learning process become more meaningful, purposeful and creative, and the knowledge acquired in this way will retain longer and be more applicable.

Although the findings of numerous empirical studies on the effects of the correlative-integrative approach in teaching science subjects have shown that this approach is more efficient than the monodisciplinary approach, this innovative instructional model is still insufficiently applied in schools in the Republic of Serbia and its neighbouring countries. In order to raise awareness of the values of the correlative-integrative approach and promote its wider application among science subject teachers, especially biology and geography teachers, the aim of this paper is to address the importance of this innovative approach to the study of natural phenomena. Pointing to a successful implementation of the correlative-integrative approach in primary school biology classes, the paper provides an overview of scenarios for teaching the topic “Life in Freshwaters” which is part of a larger unit entitled “Unity of Form and Function as the Basis of Life” of the fifth grade biology curriculum. The implementation of this teaching topic implies the horizontal integration of biology and geography contents, i.e. the implementation of the contents taught in the same grade level.

Keywords:

Correlative-integrative approach, biology teaching, contents of biology and geography, primary education.