Teaching with connections
Neha Pradhan Arora
Teaching with connections or ‘Laterally Connected Teaching’ is actually a very simple and practical approach to teaching. All it involves is for the teacher to develop a wider perspective to make connections and relate one thing to another. If we carefully examine the syllabus and the content that we teach, there are connections in all that we teach. These connections are just waiting to be discovered.
Let’s see how this happens. We use language for every other subject we teach. And children use language to comprehend and study everything. Language is the underlying connection in everything we teach and learn. There are scientific references when we study geography – chemical composition of soil, phenomena of the water cycle, space and its dimensions…. There are historical references in the science we study – people and phenomena of the past, which have led to scientific discoveries and inventions…. There are numbers and mathematical connections all around us.
So you see, these connections are everywhere. We just have to unearth them and then use them in our teaching. One may ask why it is important to bring in connections and use them when we teach. The simple reason is that the world outside the classroom, in which our children live and experience, is not divided into subjects or disciplines of science, geography, and history. They see and experience …. they absorb and assimilate …. they comprehend and analyze…the whole, all together. Hence, it is important for us to build these connections into our teaching-learning processes.
The author is a resource person at Purti, Delhi where she develops teaching-learning material and curriculum. She also conducts teacher trainings. She has been a teacher for the last 6 years and learnt and practiced this methodology at Akshar, Kolkata. She has done her MA in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and also worked in the development sector. She can be reached at neha7779@gmail.com.