Teacher in Development

More thinking around Brian Alger’s post - Curriculum:The Design of the Prerequisite.

If you’re involved in course/curriculum design, of if you live and work inside of one, you should grab a cup of coffee (make it extra strong!) and try to wade through his post.

All I can say is that my head is still mostly spinning after a third read of this amazing piece. Lots of things to think about and ponder that’s for sure.

“Education and Curriculum are interdependent.” (Alger par.4)

We’ve been discussing the use of blogs in the classroom and the difficulties and walls we seem to be bumping up against from the system we work within. I would like to venture a guess that what we’re running into is the curriculum.

Agler points out that “curriculum is the most basic technology for control and authority in education.” To me, this means that if you are involved in educating - or “training by formal instruction and supervised practice especially in a skill, trade, or profession”(qtd. from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary) then you are by default, also heavily involved in a curriculum.

Tonight’s thought:
Perhaps curriculum is neither a bad thing nor a good thing. It simply exists. It’s a part of our educational institutions, and is likely to remain so for a very long time. A curriculum can become a bad or good thing depending on the one who wields it.

In the hands of the wrong person, a curriculum becomes a one sided speech that students are forced to listen to and obey. It becomes ” a one-way technology - a push technology - a system of mass communication.”(Agler par. 5) One way. Push. Tune into this program or you fail the year or you fail the big exam at the end. One message to many, and many dialing in on one message.

Curriculum can cooly kill off passion and joy in the classroom as teachers are forced to follow the track and not deviate, and students are downgraded into passive receivers of information.

J.M., a fellow teacher who is also my brother, has written a fantastic post which explores the tension between following the curriculum and blogging.

“Part of my angst is over the seeming contradiction between the inherent open-endedness of the blog platform versus the mandated, closed nature of the literature 12 curriculum. From the research I have done, blogs and social software have been created for a multiple of personal topics. My own blog categories is indicative of this, as it ranges from education to faith and social justice. The blog reflects the blogger.”

“The lit. 12 platform seems to be on the opposite end of this spectrum. It is reflected in the proscribed reading list, and lack of flexibility in teaching (I will give the curriculum this, they do openly state that these are the ‘minimum’ readings and that students should be encouraged to read beyond the course requirements, but as an educator who is trying to equip his students for success in this course–read success on the provincial exam as well as in the course– I have a lot of cognitive dissonance over introducing any ‘extra’ texts into the course package and adding to the workload of all. So, in short, it seems that although ‘going beyond the course’ is encouraged, there is no intrinsic ‘reward’ for classes who do so. In this sense, I find the curriculum, ie the mandated reading list, to be constrictive and confining.” (Palimpsest redux)

It’s personal, social connectedness, and exploration vs. perscribed, lack of flexibility, constriction and confinement.

If we’re at all interested in our students, and being student centered teachers - and boy we had better be because it’s all about them in the first place, then we need to be thinking hard about the curriculum we are working with and under.

Curriculums BY NATURE, according to Agler, are “fundamentally a technology designed to control and impose authority.” (Agler par. 3)

While we do need to follow through with the “must knows,” we need to also make space inside the curriculum for the student and ourselves. If not, we run the terrible risk of falling into a deep joyless void where the curriculum

“exclude(s) the thoughts, ideas and experiences of the students in the educational process, or at least (…) denigrate(s) the role of student to receiver. The effect is much the same for teachers since they do not have any meaningful input into the fundamental structure of curriculum. Often, the best as teacher can do is to try an integrate creative approaches to instructional design. The problem here, of course, is that the nature of this creativity is completely subsumed, framed and shaped by the curriculum - a force that is external to them as well.” (Agler par.5)

Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, gives a great explanation around the word responsible. We are the only ones on the planet who can be exposed to a stimulus, and choose our response. We can think about what we will do as a result of something that happens OUTSIDE OF OUR CONTROL, and then act. There is a space between the stimulus and our action where we can learn how to think first, and act more responsively. We are a response - able people.

Curriculum is something that is largely out of our control. We can either get run over by it, or learn how to respond in a way that is congruous to our “must knows” but also that is friendly to student and teacher.

To be continued, but until then the floor is yours…