Empowering Grade 3 EAL Students to Understand Transdisciplinary Themes

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As the International School of Phnom Penh is a Primary Years Programme school, our students face some intimidatingly complex vocabulary in the language of the curriculum framework. As EAL teachers, we try to help our language learners orient themselves when beginning a new unit by picking apart and constructing meaning from the Transdisciplinary theme, Central Idea, and Lines of Inquiry.

For example, our Grade 3 students have just begun a unit in which they will inquire into children's rights that comes under the Transdisciplinary theme of Sharing the Planet:

"An inquiry into rights and responsibilities in the struggle to share finite resources with other people and with other living things; communities and the relationships within and between them; access to equal opportunities; peace and conflict resolution."

After exposing students to videos rich in imagery related to children's rights, Katy Perry's "Unconditionally" made as a part of her work with UNICEF, we sat down to look at the Transdisciplinary theme and how it relates to children's rights.

Students read through the theme and underlined words they were unsure of, in this case "finite", "resources", "access", "struggle", "conflict", "relationships", and "resolution". We then recorded these words on our class whiteboard and evenly distributed responsibility for finding out the meaning and explaining of these words. Students then researched using hard copy and online dictionaries such as www.dictionary.com and www.thesaurus.com, and translation services such as Google Translate. Students used a variety of methods and strategies to add meaning to these rich words, such as webbing, drawing pictures, and orally discussing the words (and translations) in their first languages.

Our next class will involve students trying to rewrite the Transdisciplinary theme in their own words, using the meanings they have discovered.

In having students engage the theme in this manner, we hope to give students a larger sense of where the knowledge, concepts, and skills they will learn and practice during the unit fit in to.