Integrated Curriculum -- What I think about this way of teaching...

After reading Chapter 2 in Susan M.  Drake and Rebecca C. Burns Meeting Standards Through Integrated Curriculum I began to feel even more convicted in my views on integrating curriculum.  I first think it's important to define integrated curriculum. Our book pointed out that there are three approaches to integration: multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary. They are defined as follows by Drake and Burns:

• multidisciplinary - one uses the disciplines as focus and standards are organized around a theme
• interdiscplinary - ones uses common standards accross the curriculum to form lessons
• transdisciplinary - ones uses students questions and censers to create the lesson. 

Now having defined integrated curriculum through its approaches one can can conclude that, put simply, integrated curriculum is including more than one 'curriculum' in a lesson. I 100% agree that no lesson should be taught without the integration of curriculum. With that said I do want to remind you of the three approaches to integration.  We constantly remind ourselves that learning must be meaningful to students and we all want to make it relative, so what not make one thing relate to another and integrate our lessons?

Coming out of undergraduate and going straight to graduate school without 'joining the profession' puts me in a different category, for lack of better words, than my peers.  In one hand I came out having it drilled in that I should always integrate curriculum, but I hear so much of how it is so hard when teacher are driven to "teach to the test." I believe that teachers should integrate curriculum as much as possible to make sure lessons are relevant to students and they can make connections in their learning.