Ingenuity in the Pandemic: A Cross-Course Science-Literacy Integration Project

Abstract

When faced with compressed hybrid courses amidst the pandemic, two university teacher educators sought to leverage the opportunity into an innovative, collaborative project to increase authentic learning experiences for their students. Pre-service teachers in one elementary literacy and one elementary science education course collaborated on a science-literacy integration project, bringing their content expertise and shared understanding of strategies to modify and improve existing lessons to equally involve reading and science. The result of this integration project proved to benefit students in their presentation skills, experimentation skills, and teaching modalities, while gaining a new perspective of our intellectual climate. Within this article, the authors seek to establish the importance of incorporating science education into the literacy curriculum of pre-service teachers, as well as to share reflections on experiences, work, and insights of those pre-service teachers already exposed to these studies.