The goal of our integrated academic curriculum is to prepare students for college and life with a curriculum built around rigor, relevance, and relationships. As students pursue knowledge in depth, working on meaningful problems and issues which are connected to their context, they make lasting connections that will enable them to master our six core skills and well as skills specific to the various academic disciplines.
To that end, the curriculum has two frameworks: Curriculum wide integrated initiatives that help students see larger connections and build our core skills; and department specific exit skills and content.
Curriculum wide integrated initiatives that specifically teach our core skills:
Curriculum Themes:
The theme of the overall curriculum is The River Journey: Discovering Places, Selves, Citizens. This provides a framework for the curriculum that uses the concept of place to help students understand not only themselves and their own place, but as they follow their journey, what it means to live in other places (both historical and contemporary) and ultimately what it means to be a citizen, locally, nationally, and globally. Each grade level team uses the broad theme of River Journey as a connecting metaphor and as a physical resource to explore place, self, and citizen.
Each grade level has its own theme which builds relevance by organizing content in that grade level and relates to the overall curriculum theme of River Journey: Discovering Places, Selves, Citizens.
Grade 9: Journey at the River: Our Place, Our Selves, Our Community
The ninth grade integrates its curriculum by examining the concept of place and self through local field experiences and content relevant to either the local area or to the themes of place and self.
Grade 10: River Journeys: Many Places, Many Selves, Many Communities
The tenth grade integrates its curriculum by expanding field experiences to the Rappahannock River and the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed and its content to places, selves, and communities throughout human history and geography, emphasizing the fundamental questions of what it means to be a self in different communities, and how that is similar and different to our own.
Grade 11: Ocean to Ocean: Ourselves, Our Nation
The eleventh grade integrates its curriculum by focusing on the national experience--particularly on the nature of American citizenship--and by drawing on watershed resources of national significance.
Grade 12: Rivers Flow Past Many Shores: Ourselves, Our World
The twelfth grade integrates its curriculum by focusing on understanding the self in relation to society globally, and again in relation to one's local place. Field experiences, initially in the watershed or virtual, will emphasize international connections and the realities of the post-colonial, 21st century world.
Points of Conflict at each grade level:
Each grade level has identified an open-ended point of conflict (areas of competing needs and wants that have no black and white resolution) in its curriculum that will enable students to make connections across disciplines and between grade levels, and build critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, moral valuation, and other skills. These are meant to engage student interest and to draw out the complex moral dilemmas and implications of content studied. Teachers use specific issues and units to bring out these broad points of conflict.
Immersions Trips at Each Grade Level
Each grade level takes one three day off-campus immersion experience during the school year. These are intended to integrate skills and content from across academic disciplines, enable hands-on experiences to reinforce connections and learning, and to build reflection and problem solving around points of conflict. The immersion experience uses the grade level's theme and point of conflict to integrate the various disciplines' work in a way that builds the relevance of topics studied and relationships between students and the resource, students and teachers, and students and students.
Independent Research and Presentation Projects in Grades 10 and 12
The project in grades 10 and 12 culminates two years of study and serves as a vehicle for students to both put into practice learned skills and to gain new skills in research, writing, and presentation. The student is assigned a project advisor depending upon his or her choice of topic. Requirements include a formal research and writing component, a presentation component, and a component that demonstrates value beyond the classroom. In each of these components, students use their research on a topic to take a position and make an argument. This is an opportunity for students to approach school from a position of interest, connection, depth, and meaning.
Trans-disciplinary Reading Assignment
Each grade level uses one text for joint use in English, history, and foreign language. The text is assigned in English class, and the other disciplines work with it in parallel. Students engage with the text in a variety of ways, including journal responses to prompts. |