Comprehensive curricular integration: A rationale and strategy for the articulation of distinctively Catholic concepts, values, and competencies across subject areas in United States Catholic secondary schools

In order for contemporary American Catholic schools to be who they say they are, Catholic school educators must articulate, embed, and live out the Church's educational ministry in all facets of school life (climate, curriculum, and co-curricular activities) in a distinctively Catholic way. Since the Second Vatican Council, the Church's educational documents have clearly and consistently called for comprehensive curricular integration , that is, curricula that underscore for students the connections and differences among the concepts, values, and competencies of all subject areas including, but not limited to, those of religion. Such a curriculum serves as an instrument so that "all the students shall come to know about the world, culture, life, and the human person is illuminated by the light of faith" (Second Vatican Council, Gravissimum Educationis, 8).; Four areas of deliberation must be consulted when inquiring into a high quality, comprehensive curricular integration that reflects the diverse realities of contemporary American Catholic schools: Catholic theology and philosophy of education, existing research in Catholic schooling, curriculum theory, and the contemporary American and American Catholic cultural milieus. As the discourses of the literature review are placed in conversation with one another and with the educational praxis in a flourishing Catholic high school, constructs emerge that provide insight into the nature and facilitation of comprehensive curricular integration. The constructs are: mission (as a conceptual framework of the Church's ministry by individual school communities), transdisciplinarity (as an organizational framework within which comprehensive curricular integration occurs), conversation (as an authentic, appropriate operational framework for educating in faith), and Catholic praxis (as a reflective and active instrumental framework to learning and living that is unique within the broader, Christian tradition).; These constructs form theoretical and practical bases for the development and formative assessment of a strategy that modifies Thomas Groome's Shared Christian Praxis approach to religious education. The strategy is intended to facilitate educating in faith across all subject areas in a comprehensive and integrating way that is at once distinctively Catholic, academically invigorating, personally challenging, and respectful of the integrity of subject areas. Using Elliot Eisner's perspective of educational connoisseurship, the strategy is critiqued through heuristic narrative in light of the mission-centered, Catholic educational praxis at a flourishing Catholic high school, based on observation, artifact interpretation, and interviews with students, teachers, and administrators. The study concentrates on the operations and content of comprehensive curricular integration in four subject areas: economics, foreign language, life sciences, and an interdisciplinary course with religion-social studies foci.; Implications are discussed regarding the theory and practice of comprehensive curricular integration for Catholic educational leaders, administrators, teachers, students and parents, for university programs of teacher education, and for educators in the public and private school sectors.