Abstract
Designing A Lesson Unit of Social Studies with Drake's Fusion Approach of Integrated Education
Integrated education is aimed at gathering the content provided from different fields of
science in a single lesson and presenting it to the students. The field of activity of integrated
education has expanded since the early twentieth century. And over time, various forms of
its have been developed by different educators. One of these educators, Susan Margaret
Drake, has developed three main patterns that include different approaches of integrated
education. These are multi-disciplinary (disciplinary approach, fusion approach, serviceoriented
learning approach, learning centers-parallel disciplines approach and thematic
units approach), interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (project-based learning approach
and program discussion approach) patterns. Social Studies, which is an integrated
education lesson, aims to teach by combining the information it provides from social
science fields. Three different approaches have been used in the teaching of diciplines that
provide the content of Social Studies from past to present. These are disciplinary (1924,
1926, 1930, 1932, 1936 and 1948 curriculums), multi-disciplinary (1968 curriculum and
a part of 1998 curriculum) and interdisciplinary (1998 curriculum partially, 2005 and
2018 curriculums completely)). In the literature review, no studies have been found in
which Drake’s fusion approach in integrated education within the scope of Social Studies
lesson. It is assumed that this research will overcome this shortcoming in the literature
and will be a source for subsequent similar studies. This research was done with document
analysis from qualitative research patterns. In the research, a Social Studies lesson unit
was created according to Drake's integrated education patterns. The unit, which includes
4 achievements in the context of 5 topics, was first presented to the opinion of 3 field
experts and its suitability was confirmed formally and contextually for the Social Studies
lesson. In the next stage, it was evaluated within the scope of the issues in the 2018 Social
Studies Curriculum.
Keywords
Social Studies Teaching, Drake’s Fusion Approach, İntegrated Education, Unit Designing.
