Redrawing the cross-curricular map: An interdisciplinary approach to curriculum design across the humanities

ANDREW COVENTON, ASSISTANT HEAD OF SIXTH FORM, DOVER GRAMMAR SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, UK Can a curriculum be truly ‘broad’ and ‘coherent’ if opportunities are missed to forge insightful inter-disciplinary connections between subjects? Mary Myatt (2018, p. 128) suggests that ‘cross-curricular planning has had a bad rap in recent years’. Cross-curricular initiatives have often failed due to a muddled genericism and a doomed attempt to forge tenuous connections based on vague ‘themes’ or universalised domain-independent skills such as ‘communication’, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’. Kirschner and Hendrick (2020, p. 15) draw on the work of John Sweller to claim that these skills ‘don’t exist’ as ‘domain-independent’ entities and that students can only achieve a sense of true academic mastery through the acquisition of subject-specific substantive knowledge. However, to treat subjects as hermetically sealed ‘silos’ is to miss valuable opp