Naturalistic Education Theory (NET) is a strategy to develop an interdisciplinary curriculum in the sciences that is a developmentally-appropriate, pedagogical guide for engineering and evaluating the construction of a horizontally and vertically aligned and integrated concept sequence.
NET proposes that instruction be based on the understandings of the physical mechanisms of the brain. It is a natural curriculum sequencing theory, historically developed, that infers that information made up of bytes which should be arranged and taught in the same manner in which they were originally discovered, disregarding artificial categorization into traditional academic disciplines. The historical-based sequence sets up an interdisciplinary learning spiral around the continuity of information bytes and their systematic linking together, web-style, for a meaningful, four-dimensional concept map structure with continuous associations. This instructional process yields a mental construct fueled by natural curiosity through a developmentally-based need to know. The structure and functional relationship of the resulting curriculum and instruction flows naturally as if the discoveries were their own architects and their revelation engineered by their own processes of evolution.
The NET provides an integrated, holistic explanation of the research, filing, retrieval and processing mechanisms of the brain insofar as they associate to pedagogy. Based on mechanistic premises, it provides a theoretical foundation on which sound instructional engineering can begin.