Integrated Geography Lessons: Teachers‘ Attitude

Analysis of scientific literature and educational documents showed that integrated education, providing grounds for manifestation of multipartite intelligence, creates the background for all subjects to serve as the linking part of education. Qualified knowledge of relationships between subjects and their integration help the students to use their abilities and give sense to learning, facilitate better memorization of the necessary information, deepen, broaden and correlate knowledge and abilities, stimulate learning motivation, develop students’ ability to communicate and cooperate, allow qualitative distribution of learning time, and encourage the teachers to work as a team. The analysed scientific works are devoted to integration methods, levels and models and discuss the problems and possibilities of integrated education. Yet there is lack of research works dealing with generalization of experiences of teachers giving integrated lessons in comprehensive schools, possibilities of cooperation with other interested parties, highlighting the merits and demerits of integrated lessons and most popular didactic methods and teaching/learning strategies, attitude of teachers towards integrated lessons, and correlation of integrated lessons with dynamics of teaching/learning results. Analysis of scientific literature and educational documents served as a basis for formulation of the present research issue: the attitude of geography teachers towards the integrated lessons emphasizing the above-mentioned aspects. The conducted survey showed certain general positive and negative aspects of work in integrated lessons, revealed the opinion of geography teachers as to the possibilities of integration of geography lessons with other lessons, pointed up teaching/learning methods applied in integrated lessons, and helped to find the correlation between the integrated lessons and dynamics of obtained teaching / learning results. Generalized results revealed that almost all teachers of geography give on the average 2–3 integrated lessons per year. The integration of geography lessons with mathematics, economy, history, biology and informatics was most successful. The greatest difficulties occurred at attempts to integrate with physics and Lithuanian language. It is gratifying to know that during the integrated lessons geography teachers rather intensively cooperate with colleagues in planning lessons and developing teaching/learning strategies. The request to score own integrated lessons from 1 to 5 points (1 – bad, 5 – excellent) showed that the average score of all respondents is 4. The pointed reasons of low scores and demerits of integrated lessons were as follows: poorly coordinated subject programmes, lack of confidence or competence to give integrated lessons, lack of students’ interest in such lessons, inadequate timetable for integration of lessons, lack of time to prepare for integrated lessons, contradictory attitudes of teachers, and reduced possibilities of individual learning. The pointed out positive aspects of integrated lessons were as follows: encouragement of motivation and active participation during lessons, increased interest in subjects, widening of world outlook, improvement of teachers’ competences, and development of communication abilities of teachers and students. The survey data also revealed one more positive aspect: a possibility to apply wide spectrum of methods in integrated lessons. Teachers of geography pointed out that they not only used the known classical methods but various interactive methods as well. Many respondents expressed regret that during the integrated lessons they were forced to confine to schoolrooms, i.e. had no opportunity to change the learning environment. In teachers’ opinion, the learning results of students were better after the integrated lessons.