Projekty interdyscyplinarne w klasach 2 IB MYP

Thanks to combining the perspectives of these subjects, it helped me understand the topic of taking risk and its consequences and the statement of inquiry – Change often leads to interaction that may stimulate creativity producing outcomes that engage the audience. By writing the stressful situation in my story and combining it with biology knowledge I have learned and understood how taking this risk influences our bodies. For example, adrenaline may boost our strength and endurance, helping us get away from a dangerous situation. A strength of combining these processes is efficient learning, as you can write whatever story you wish to and combine it with learned information. Thanks to that, you can combine something potentially pleasant with work. However, there is also a limitation to combining these two subjects. It’s hard to connect the Biology knowledge with the story in a smooth way, as stopping the action in order to explain the biological processes makes the story less dynamic and possibly confusing. Especially if you focus too much on explaining stress processes instead of the action in the story, making it seem more like a scientific paper than a story.

In order to communicate knowledge from both English and Biology classes in my project, I have combined my story’s action with a bit of explaining the processes happening, while trying to make it seem natural.  For the English knowledge part, I have written a story with it’s hopefully correct structure, as well as used English vocabulary. To show my biology knowledge, I have explained what cortisol is and when it secretes, as well as what it does. Moreover, I have explained what adrenaline is, where it is secreted and what it does.

At the very beginning my knowledge on stress hormones and story writing was fairly basic, I did know a couple of things but that would be about it. During the creation of my story I have already gained needed knowledge for me to write in more details about the processes occurring when we are stressed (secretion of cortisol and adrenaline). It also helped me realize how incredible and strong the human body actually is.

Thanks to this project I have learned that human body isn’t as delicate as it sometimes seems to be. In reality it is much stronger than we take it for. For example thanks to adrenaline, even if you get severely injured, our body is still able to function perfectly, helping us get away from danger. This project made me more aware of my strengths and limitations when it comes to my own body and its endurance, leading to my self-growth and raise in awareness.

I’ve read some stories during English lessons that show changes in people’s lives which made me understand the topic better. I’ve also read about interactions, even the ones that might be the cause of stress and it helped me with figuring out the topic of my story, but also understanding the matter of interaction as well. I’ve also understood what the audience could expect knowing that they are the readers of a teenage magazine and understand that the audience is important and how to adjust our story to it. Based on many stories we’ve read during English lessons I’ve realized the purpose of stories – they are supposed to teach us something or we can just learn a lesson based on what’s happening in a story. Reading these stories made me understand the purpose of writing it. 

I also need biological knowledge to understand the statement of inquiry “Change often leads to interaction that may stimulate creativity producing outcomes that

engage the audience.”, because I had to understand human behavior and realize how our bodies react to certain stimuli. Change can interest people and I needed my biological knowledge to understand how it actually engages our bodies. I also needed information gathered during English lessons so I could understand how using the English Language in writing presents change and how to attract the audience with the right vocabulary that will make them more interested in changes happening in my story.

It is important to understand taking risk and its consequences to the point that we can give examples of situations in which we take risk and how it affects us. We should be able to know what qualifies as risk and how it actually works. It was important to understand the topic of taking risk and its consequences to the point that I could make this story interesting, while showing some important knowledge that can be the result of this risk taking for example how our body reacts to stress so the purpose of learning something from this story actually remains. It was also vital to understand it so a statement of inquiry is included as well and seeing the interactions visible in my story stimulate creativity producing outcomes that engage the audience and makes them interested in my story and in learning how our body can react in stressful situations so they can even relate to it. It was important to understand how big and noticeable a change should be in order to make the audience engaged. It was also vital to realize what the audience might be expecting based on the fact that they are teeangers so we should understand it to an extent when we use the information about the audience to make it interesting. We should also understand the change itself and how big it needs to be in order to be seen as an interesting change. We should also understand interaction to the point that we can show it in an interesting way to give an example to also show the purpose which we should understand as well – we should know what knowledge we want to pass on in our story.

    Combining the perspectives of these subjects helped me understand this topic of taking risk and its consequences and our statement of inquiry by showing me how our body’s biological reactions to stress appear in real situations. Even though the situation of kidnapping that appeared in my story is strictly imagined, it shows how our body reactions appear in practical situations in real life. Combining risk present in a story with change that leads to engaging the audience shows how these things rely on each other and they put the story together, because the risk present in a story affects the audience that reacts to stressful situations mentioned in a story caused by taking risk.

This year the two subjects combined were Biology and language acquisition English. The knowledge from both these subjects helped me understand the topic of taking risk and its consequences. During English classes, we learnt about several situations that are risky and can cause stress. We got to know the consequences of taking risk and the fact that it may lead to new discoveries and various forms of creativity. We talked about people who often risked their lives for a possibility to discover something new or benefit from a situation. English lessons helped me realize how beneficial and worth it taking risks is. They broadened my mind when it comes to that. We read stories and analyzed their structure and components. This way, we knew how to write a story on our own. However, in order to do that, we also needed quite broad knowledge from biology. Risk is a factor that has an impact on our organism. It may cause stress which provokes a certain reaction that puts us in a survival mode. During our Biology classes we talked about complex reactions that happen. Thanks to combining the overall view on risk with the biological information about it, we could get a whole view about how it works and its consequences both inside our bodies and outside. We could connect the internal and external causes and better understand how nature and human relations work. For example, the fact that we may stop feeling pain when we are stressed (Biology) helped us understand why the mountain climber whose story we watched during English became stronger when there was a risk he could have fallen down and why he was not willing to give up. I could think of a risky situation and imagine what happens in our nerve cells and glands while we experience it. Such knowledge was crucial in order to fully understand the topic as well as the statement of inquiry. During this project it was as follows ‘Change often leads to interaction that may stimulate creativity producing outcomes that engage the audience.’ I could vividly see how we referred to it while discussing consecutive topics. In Biology, except for the influence of stress, we fully covered interaction between organisms. Such knowledge is also related to the statement of inquiry, we talked about cooperation and mutualism among species which can lead to discovering completely new solutions. In English, however, we discussed the topic of risk connected to eating insects. While doing that, we played different roles and looked at the matter from various perspectives. We then debated and brainstormed in order to ‘produce outcomes that engage the audience’. We can really see how everything was connected and important in order to succeed.