students within the classroom according to global geographical region rather than individually diagnosed educational aptitude. Integrating computer use with standard text use, the students in the classroom came up with flags and geographical knowledge that were to be used to develop and promote the other groups' awareness of their region. Novelli offers specific recommendations for making such an approach fruitful: variety of technology; open-ended use of learning media; awareness of varying learning-speed aptitudes; involving instructors with special qualifications; constant evaluation; rebalancing of study groups as needed.
The integrated approach to teaching and learning was envisioned by its advocates as a mechanism for enabling students not merely to be passive recipients of top-down transmission of instruction, in the mold of traditional lecture/reading classroom time, but instead to interact with learning resources so as to be able to actively participate in and structure, or construct, their own growing social-studies knowledge base, as an attribute of their previous beliefs or existing knowledge, interaction with other students, their evolving experience, and their integration of new information with the rest of their knowledge. Indeed, Hoge (1988) cites research showing that elementary-age children cannot think formally about history, another way of saying that they may not be able to absorb. Hence the emergence of the term constructivism, or sometimes social constructivism, to describe a teaching method that valorizes active student engagement with the tools of knowledge "so as to develop[] a community of learners" (White, 1997).
The role of the teacher in a constructivist classroom setting is that not that of expert pedagogue transmitting wisdom but rather of facilitator of emerging knowledge (Vygotsky, 1985). The objective is to "educe reliance on textbooks and teacher talk and instead giving students the responsibil...