Locating curriculum integration within the historical context: Innovations in Aotearoa New Zealand state schools, 1920s-1940s

The concept of curriculum integration has long held appeal as a way to both unite knowledge and meet the educational needs of young people. Yet many contemporary educators have dismissed this concept as a romantic but unworkable idea. Nonetheless, during the more progressive periods in the history of New Zealand education, a few determined teachers, often working on their own in remote rural communities, have implemented some striking and innovative examples of curriculum integration. This paper examines examples of curriculum integration and allied innovations developed by pioneering teachers in New Zealand in the interwar period between the 1920s and 1940s. It draws its data from a doctoral study which traced a century of development of curriculum integration in the USA, Britain and New Zealand. It concludes that some of the largely forgotten designs for curriculum integration developed in New Zealand in the interwar period are similar in intent to the contemporary student-centred ‘integrative’ model of curriculum integration and may usefully inform the current discourse concerning the design of schooling for young adolescents.