Salem Witches, Here We Come!

8th Grade Teachers - Interdisciplinary Work (Part 1)

The use of an interdisciplinary unit is not new to education. While the pedagogy may not go as far back as Vygotsky, it is a widely accepted and utilized form of education used to ignite students’ interest in ways that other studies cannot. The concept begins with teachers collaborating across curriculums. In our case, Mrs. Fenner and Mr. Arkin met multiple times over the summer in an attempt to see where their curriculums could align. This idea spawned from a truly beneficial professional development conference that the two attended in the spring of 2016. The conference focused on teaching students how to write essays in response to Document-Based Questions or DBQs. Students respond in an essay or series of short-answer writings to a large thematic question, something broad that could cover an entire unit of study. The students have to support their claims in these writings with knowledge acquired from provided sources (primary and secondary documents).

This year, Mr. Arkin and Mrs. Fenner decided to tackle a unit on the Salem Witch Trials. The Salem Witch Trials are not only fascinating to learn about, but also helpful because they provide a quick review of colonial life and Puritan roots in American life and government. Students also explored the ideas of fundamentalism. To meet the needs of the History class, Mr. Arkin taught Arthur Miller’s famous play, The Crucible, a play that documents the fears of witchcraft to the residents of Salem, Massachusetts, in an extremely religiously fundamental Puritan New England. As Mr. Arkin’s class read the dramatized happenings of the time through the play, Mrs. Fenner taught the facts of the time. Students would shoot from one class to the other beaming with anticipation. They knew the ending (19 people and two dogs convicted of witchcraft and hanged for their crimes), but they wanted to know why! This is the goal of an interdisciplinary unit: why! Why do we study what we do? And the only way to come by that answer is to approach the conversation holistically and completely. Mrs. Fenner did this with close examination of primary source documents from the King James version of the Bible. Her students also analyzed charts about ages and gender of the accused and accusers, court records, art works, excerpts of famous writings, and maps of the town that included where the accused and accusers lived in relation to each other. Students then organized the documents based on what reasons they thought caused the hysteria behind the witch trials. Students were constantly comparing what was happening in the documents to what Arthur Miller was writing about in The Crucible. Similarly, Mr. Arkin used reading techniques to get at Arthur Miller’s greater point that man reacts to traumatizing or confusing times with mass hysteria. Students in Mr. Arkin’s class linked the Salem Witch Trials to other times in history where fear gripped society: including but not limited to Nazi Germany, McCarthyism, and modern day Islamophobia. Lastly, Mrs. Beal’s science classes discussed the science behind a once popular (but disproven) theory that ergot poisoning was to blame for hysterical fits that many suffered from.