Cross-Curricular Themes

1. General overview
- offering (interdisciplinary) integrate courses to complement pupils' academic education -

The classical (formal) objects studied in school cannot alone offer a completely effective tool for cultivating pupils' competencies, values and attitudes needed for personal and social success. Like many other contemporary educational initiatives, Equal Opportunities for Roma Children through School Development Programs and Parents' Involvement program aims to attend this goal by offering (interdisciplinary) integrate courses to complement pupils' academic education, in order to adapt the educational process to pupils' daily life and to the needs of the Roma communities where those schools involved in the program are placed. Thus, through the fruitful diversification of the educational field due to modern approaches in terms of curriculum, a new component was introduced: The Cross-curricular Themes.

2. Description

The cross-curricular themes are educational integrated (interdisciplinary) themes focused on pupils' personal and social evolvement. These themes are transversal, aiming to go beyond the borders of the traditional school objects and offer competence and/or fundamental values formation in the daily life. To be successfully implemented in school, the cross-curricular themes require diverse learning experiences and the testing of learning acquisitions in various concrete contexts.

The cross-curricular themes' content can fit one of the following strongly interrelated categories:

1. Cross-curricular themes that are mainly interested in promoting positive behaviors, values and attitudes (personal evolvement, social integration, cultural diversity, health, etc.). These themes aim to answer crucially important social needs that cannot be satisfactorily approached by one single discipline or by a group of individual not-interrelated disciplines.
2. Cross-curricular themes addressing particular problems that cannot be adapted to the structure of a particular object. These problems are very complex and came along with some challenges the contemporary society poses to education. They include the environment, mass-media education, conflict negotiation and conciliation, life standards, etc.
3. Cross-curricular themes aiming to form basic competencies like communication, problem solving, learning to learn, entrepreneurship. These competencies don't "belong" to a particular object; but they have a great transfer potential concerning both the curriculum and the concrete life contexts.

3. Technical assistance

All these three categories are complementary to the educational instruction; they represent integrated constructions that help elaborating an equilibrated and coherent learning offer focused on the present needs of the youngsters.

The project's aim is to help the professorial staff from the network schools become familiarized with these activities. As part of this project, the following themes are of great relevance:

• Quality-oriented education (a great stress lays on personal quality, life standards and environment standards);
• Entrepreneurial education (focused on personal and social initiative stimulation and entrepreneurial behavior formation);
• Cultural diversity-oriented education (focused on mutual understanding, emphasizing the interdependencies in the local community, and converting cultural kinship and differences into a fertile resource).

These three major themes constitute top priorities for the network schools and are to be addressed according to the schools specific and the available resources in the context of each object, of the interdisciplinary projects, of the curriculum elaborated by the schools, and of the extracurricular activities. The activities supporting these themes are to be extended to the overall strategy of educational evolvement, and to the curriculum as a whole.

4. Activities

After the first meeting in discussing this component, the schools elaborated various integrated (cross-curricular) projects focused on the above mentioned themes. Among them there are:

• The traditional crafts festival - Chiliseni School, Suceava
• Romanies' traditions and customs - School no.6 Caracal, Olt
• Environment-oriented education; Nourishment hygiene - Mironu School, Suceava
• Let's write history ourselves - Scheia School, Suceava
• Healthy growing, self-growing - Comlosu Mare School, Timis
• Children' Fair; The Secret of Success - Podu Iloaiei School, Iasi
• Everyday wandering about the world; An open soul… - Alexandru cel Bun School, Iasi
• Designing my classroom - School no.13, Cluj
• Improved life standard through community involvement - School no.12, Cluj
• Mens sana in corpore sano - Mîinesti-Bals School, Olt
• We live in a clean healthy world - School no.1, Bals-Olt
• Imaginary market; Health-oriented Education - School no.6, Alexandria-Teleorman
• Familty-oriented education - School no.3, Zimnicea-Teleorman
• Human rights - School no.2, Mizil-Prahova
• We create our world's future - School no.11, Ploiesti-Prahova
• A clean and healthy future world - School no.2, Bucharest

By implementing these and other related projects that will be analyzed in regional seminaries, we expect successful outcomes able to motivate more and more schools to employ such perspectives of approaching the curriculum.