Course Description
Designed for the educator who wants to expand and reinforce learning across diverse subject areas, this course provides the opportunity to earn graduate-level credit for creating an integrated curriculum that reaches students on multiple levels. Using your own personal travel experiences as a model, you will create activities, projects, and lessons that require students to transfer their learning to other settings. Incorporate map skills as you have students plan their own journey; math skills as they create a budget for their trip or convert foreign currency to U.S. dollars; social skills as they learn culturally related differences in behavior in the “intended” country of travel…. Once you have developed and implemented your ideas for an integrated curriculum in your classroom, you will create a slide presentation demonstrating the professional outcomes of your travel experience and submit it, along with your travel journal and a 1-2 page reflective write-up, for evaluation.
About University of the Pacific
University of the Pacific, established in 1851, is California’s oldest private chartered university and is fully accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC).
The credits offered are post-baccalaureate, graded, graduate-level semester units of credit, provided directly through University of the Pacific, Benerd College. They are specifically designed to meet the needs of educators for Salary Advancement and Recertification. The credits/units are acceptable where local districts approve and applicable to state licensing where authorized. We always encourage you to check with your employer for acceptability of these credits/units. Course participants are responsible to determine acceptability of these credits for their intended use. Each graduate-level semester credit is equivalent to 15 hours of academic involvement.
Course Objectives
Upon successful mastery of this course, you will be able to:
- Identify areas of the curriculum with inherent connections that can be exploited.
- Choose the areas of the curriculum most in need of scaffolding and extra support to enhance cross-curricular connections.
- Integrate your subject matter expertise and experiential travel learnings to create activities or materials that will reveal, clarify, or build connections between different issues, themes, or subjects.
- Implement the activities or materials into your lessons to engage students in activities that build connections and clarify links between ideas, subjects, and learnings.
- Reflect on the effectiveness of the activities relative to your students’ learnings across the curriculum.
- Create a 25-30 slide PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation to demonstrate the professional outcomes of your travel experiences.
- Reflect on the professional development experiences, specific to your future growth.