Oh, the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Middle School Curriculum Blends English and Social Studies

As a student, Sarah Cohen sometimes questioned why English and social studies were taught as entirely unrelated subjects. “I always felt that the skills and knowledge developed in English and social studies were closely linked,” says the Grade 6 humanities teacher. “I viewed them as so intertwined.”

That’s why Cohen and her colleagues in the Middle School humanities department embrace the Rivers approach. Instead of treating English and social studies as separate disciplines, the curriculum combines the two, for reasons that are intentional, thoughtful, and tied to the intellectual and developmental needs of students in Grades 6 through 8. Sixth graders take on the world and water as their humanities subject; seventh graders study global citizenship; and Grade 8 students tackle systems of justice and injustice.

An interdisciplinary approach is one of the cornerstones of a Rivers education. Middle School humanities is interdisciplinary in the broadest sense, at times touching on not just English and social studies but science, art, math, and more. Melissa Dolan ’98, a former Grade 8 humanities teacher who now consults on the Middle School’s curriculum, notes that “humanities was built on the understanding that student learning is strengthened when the connections between disciplines and concepts are explored on a regular basis.”

“We’re preparing students for English and history, but it’s not just English plus history,” she continues. “It’s recognizing the power of bringing two or more disciplines together to explore real-world issues that could not be done on their own. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

The approach leaves plenty of room for connecting the classroom with the outside world—and for pivoting when local, national, and world events become powerful catalysts for learning and growth. The Grade 7 humanities faculty team of Eitan Tye and Walker Anderson found itself in that position last fall, when the events of October 7 in Israel escalated hostilities in the Middle East. 

Tye had spent the previous year in Tel Aviv, earning a master’s degree in global migration and policy. With the conflict too important to ignore, he emailed John Bower, head of the Middle School, asking whether he and Anderson might shift the curriculum to include a unit on Israel, Palestine, and the long, complex history behind the war. 

It wasn’t an “immediate green light,” Bower recalls. But after much discussion with Dolan and the Upper School history, English, and interdisciplinary studies department heads, says Bower, “We said, ‘Go for it!’”

Go for it they did, ordering new materials and planning lessons. “They were off and running, feeling well supported by the department and academic leadership,” says Bower. 

The class took as its primary text a young adult version of the book The Lemon Tree, supplementing it with additional readings to provide historical context and balance. Says Tye, “The Lemon Tree is a remarkable nonfiction story about an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian who had lived in the same house at different times. After the creation of Israel, they met and formed a friendship, and that house became a center for coexistence. It felt like a really effective choice of a book to read.”

Another key component of the unit had the Grade 7 students making presentations to Upper School students during advisory. They had researched coexistence organizations working to bring Israeli and Palestinian youth together, and they were poised and well prepared to field the inevitable questions and comments. 

Taking on this fraught topic might have seemed a bit risky. “I know a lot of schools aren’t diving into it. We were focused on teaching a variety of perspectives and using essential questions to guide our teaching of the unit,” says Tye. “Where are there multiple perspectives that all contain truth? How can people find shared values? We really try to use questions to provide as balanced a perspective as possible.”

Anderson adds the inherent ambiguity in this approach is challenging. “We said, ‘You’re not going to know the solution at the end. The world’s smartest people haven’t been able to solve this in 50 years, and we’re not going to.’ That can be frustrating, because kids are solutions-oriented. But you’ve got to understand the world before you can change it,” he says. “One of the greatest gifts we can give our students is to help them embrace complexity.”

Tye and Anderson’s work in teaching about the war will soon have a reach that goes beyond Rivers. The two were selected to present on the topic at the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) conference in November, the largest gathering of its kind for middle school teachers and administrators.

Tye says when he talks about teaching the unit, “many people’s first reaction is, ‘Wow, they let you do that? You really want to get into that?’ So for me, this conference is less about, ‘Let me show you that I’m the expert’ than ‘Let me show you that it’s possible—that we can get into more complicated geopolitical topics.’”

Rivers students arrive in Grade 7 ready to tackle such substantive matters, having gone through the Grade 6 humanities course. There, the groundwork is laid, as Cohen leads them through an interdisciplinary curriculum that is focused on water. 

First, says Cohen, she introduces them to the concept of humanities. “They’ve never had the subject before. They’ve had English and social studies, but they’ve never had an interdisciplinary class,” she says. She encourages them to notice the fact that “the word ‘human’ is in there. We talk about how humans get to know each other, through stories, art, laws, architecture—so many ways. So after we get an idea of what ‘humanities’ might be, we talk about how we’re going to study their culture and experiences by examining their relationship with water.”

Over the course of the year, students look at life along the Ganges, humanity’s connections with whales, and the destructive power of water, as it played out during Hurricane Katrina. They pick up trash along the Charles River, visit the Waterworks Museum, and, as a culminating project, conduct and present independent research on an environmental challenge facing a particular body of freshwater somewhere in the world. The Grade 6 humanities also includes a news-literacy component, as a way of creating a scaffolding for students to talk about current events; Bruce Taylor ’73 picks up and amplifies that theme in his Grade 7 media literacy class.

The framework of water, so universal and relatable, allows Grade 6 students to “stretch their perception over the course of the year,” says Cohen. “It helps grow their abstract thinking skills, respect other realities, ask questions and pursue answers; it’s so developmentally appropriate for sixth graders.

“At this age,” she continues, “kids are explorers at heart. If you can harness that, it gives them a natural foundation.”

That foundation carries them through Grade 7’s Global Citizenship curriculum and on into Grade 8’s Systems of Justice and Injustice. Here again, the curriculum meets the students where they are, developmentally and intellectually.

“Anyone who knows 14-year-old students knows they are acutely aware of fairness and unfairness,” says Dolan. “They are hungry for real-world connections.”

They find those connections in their Grade 8 humanities classroom, where Jeff Baker and Caroline Boston work in concert to explore the systems that underpin justice and injustice. Baker previously taught at the college level, and he says he appreciates the relative lack of cynicism among middle schoolers. “The kids seem far more open and willing to be surprised,” he says. “That’s something I’ve always loved about teaching: when a student is open to being surprised, not only by the material, but by what they’re capable of doing with it.”

At the same time, he says, the eighth graders share some of the same concerns that trouble college students. “The material may be different, but the questions are the same: What is freedom? What is equality? How does one effect change? What are the values that inform the change we want to see? The kids, I quickly came to realize, wanted these conversations.”

Describing the class, Baker says that “on paper, it’s an interdisciplinary course that looks through the American experience through the lens of various identities, and the ways power has led to change. But really, my short answer is that it’s a class of ideas.”

While the course follows a framework and curriculum, culminating in a capstone independent research project, Baker appreciates having the freedom and latitude to go where the students’ curiosity leads. “I want the kids to be able to determine where the lens of the course is pointed that day, as long as it’s in the spirit of the course,” he says. 

For students, Baker says, the topics covered in class can come as a revelation. “We crack open the world as it is and how it got that way,” he says. “We’re looking at deeper systems that prop up these inequities. For instance, we learn about redlining, and a fuse goes off. ‘Wait, how could redlining be legal?’ They learn how it continues to impact communities, and they say, ‘Wait, what?’ It’s great to watch, and they’re grateful to have connections made. They feel like they’re being initiated into the secrets of the world.”

That can make for some challenging moments in class. “But I think kids want to be afforded the opportunity to get outside the structures of binary thinking,” says Baker. “When they begin to be introduced to complexity and nuance, while it can make them uncomfortable, it can give them so many more ways to approach the world, and that can be liberating. I love to see them wrestle with that challenge. I tell them we’re not going to get an answer. We might not get where we think we’re supposed to go, but if we ask better questions, we’re going to get closer.”

Baker encourages a range of viewpoints in the classroom. “One of my most engaged students was deeply conservative,” he recalls, “which led to some of the best discussions in class. I don’t want to teach kids what to think but how to think—and how to feel. The first means nothing without the second.”

Perhaps most important for this age group, Baker allows the students to experience their own growing sense of autonomy as independent readers, writers, and thinkers. “Kids want to feel they have agency, and they feel honored to be offered agency at an age when most of the grown-ups in the world aren’t always hearing them,” he says.

The humanities sequence is intended to lay a firm foundation for more advanced English and history classes, and some of that is accomplished by real and consistent collaboration among its members, says Tye. 

“It’s a really strong team, and we’re clear as a department what our priorities are,” says Tye. “If you asked each one of us ‘What do you want to get out of class, and what do you want students to get out of class?’ you’d have shades of the same answer. The goal is not to have kids memorize dates and locations; the goal is to help them develop as writers, readers, and thinkers.”

Says Bower, “If we can get students to wrestle with depth and complexity, then they can arrive in the Upper School and beyond ready to navigate complex issues. Those are the tangible skills we want students to walk away with.”

When teachers exercise their freedom to pivot, it is always grounded in skill-building, notes Dolan. Paraphrasing education researcher David Perkins, she calls it “educating for the unknown,” and it underlies the entire humanities trajectory. “All we do is teach for the unknown,” she says, noting that the rise of AI and unforeseen events such as COVID have made qualities like flexibility and resilience more important than ever. “It’s a testament to the ways in which the curriculum is responsive, rather than reactive. The students don’t know what’s coming down the pike—but they’re ready for it.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of the Riparan, Rivers’ alumni magazine.