REAL WORLD APPLICATION

One cause of students' resistance to a standard curriculum is the distance they perceive between what they are taught in school and the circumstances of their own lives.

To counteract this perceived rift between academics and daily experience, the Discovery Institute encourages the development of learning activities that demonstrate connectivity; in other words, students discover that history, science, mathematics and literacy are, in fact, evident within their own lived worlds, and that the importance of these subjects lies in expanding the reach of that with which they are already familiar.

For example, discovery educators might replace studying the structure and function of "the cell" - an abstraction with little connection to daily life - with investigating the biology of a cell afflicted with a common and familiar disease. Similarly, our English teachers might move toward a character analysis of Hamlet by first having students read poems and stories depicting difficult choices that urban adolescents make daily. Social studies and history classes become arenas for discovering that current issues of concern to students often echo events and ideologies of the past. All of these subjects are interdisciplinarily coordinated among the teachers, and students experience a continuum between their lives and academic study.

Such an approach helps to reduce the common conviction among students that school is an entity separate from life, a building where meaningless and inapplicable academic exercises are foisted upon them. Recognizing and legitimizing the worlds of our students, and making this recognition clear from the beginning of a lesson, brings the reality of issues raised in the classroom home, just as it brings home into the classroom.