Cycle Four Concluding Post: Curricula in the Hands of Teachers

As we close the course, I want to first thank you for an excellent semester together. I have enjoyed getting to know each of you. I have enjoyed dialoging with you about your experiences and your ideas. It has been an unprecedented time and I feel lucky to have shared it with each of you. So, thank you!

So, as we close, a few final thoughts.

Curriculum, as we have learned in this course, answers a fundamental question that all societies must answer: What knowledge is of most worth? What do we want to pass on to our children?

We cannot teach everything. There is not enough time, even across an entire lifespan, to learn all that can be learned. Therefore, curriculum is an agreement. Ideally, in a pluralistic society such as ours, this agreement is grounded in a rational and defensible procedure—a procedure that directs teachers and parents as they seek to assist children.

As we begin the process of creating curricula, experts are usually consulted. Experts on content, experts on child development, and experts on social need. But at the end of the day, we don't have a curriculum until teachers are consulted and brought into the process. A curriculum does not live until it's in the hands of teachers working with students.

What I believe that this cycle has shown us is that, as teachers, a curriculum is most helpful when it sets out broad goals that leave teachers plenty of space to maneuver. That allows teachers to respond to the unique needs of unique persons and communities. That allows teachers to work from the interests and questions of children themselves.

This becomes very clear when we consider curricula that deal with sexuality. Because we have to ask, there, as in math or reading: What is our ultimate goal?

Our goal in reading is not just that kids read. It's that they read good books across their lifetime, enjoy those books, and become better people for having read them.

Our goal in math is not just that kids can add and subtract. It's that children see relationships and patterns. It's that they can make reasonable predictions about the future based on information about the past and present. It's that they can deal well with uncertainty—resolving it when possible, and living with it when they can’t.

Our goal in sex ed is not just that kids know what causes and can prevent pregnancy. It's that children can enter into relationships that are happy and fulfilling. That they can build families in which they and their offspring—should they choose to have them—can thrive and flourish. In short, the goal of sexuality education is not always what people think.

Curricula are unhelpful when they over-specify what it is that we need to do as teachers. Yes, we can teach first graders to read, or third graders to multiply, or fifth graders how to use birth control. Facts and skills can be laid out and, as teachers, we can "implement" such curricula. 

But we must not lose sight of our goals. Our goal is to forward a child's learning. That means, at the end of the day, we must always assess our end goal in terms of the child's current conditions--their readiness, intellectually and emotionally, to do what we are asking them to do. 

Dewey suggested that a curriculum is a map. A way to chart a journey. But, it is not the journey itself. Learning math is not a journey. Living a life in which math is helpful and useful is the journey.

Only the child can undertake that journey, and it is the teacher's job to make sure that, day by day, year by year, the child is heading in the right direction.

Cycle Three Concluding Post: Technology as Tool, Technology as System

Thank you, everyone, for your work on this cycle! Your posts were essential reading as I—along with everyone else—tried to make sense of what this current public health crisis might mean for our collective future.

Many of you, as you reflected on the COVID-19 public health crisis, asked a series of related questions: Will education ever be the same? Didn’t the current crisis reveal a degree of unpreparedness by many public schools that will need to be rectified in the future? Don’t we need to make sure that the educational disruption that some children are experiencing does not happen again?

Put most broadly, most boldly, and, perhaps, most optimistically: Might we be witnessing the birth of a new form of public education?

While I have no answers or no predictions to any of these questions, I will share with you a few observations I’ve made after having read your posts.

As teachers, most of us have been trained to view technology as a tool. We are taught to ask: Is this specific technological application the right tool for the job at hand? Is Freckle or CrashCourse video going to enhance my instruction and assist me as I help my students reach state standards for their grade level?

But what this current moment is reminding me is that technology can also be a system. That is, it's not just a particular tool, but a series of interrelated tools that, working in interaction, can change the way we do things.

As educators, perhaps it’s time to stop looking for tools, and start thinking about systems.

Take Khan Academy. You could take any one of his videos and ask if it enhances instruction around a topic. For example, does this video on the French Revolution assist me as I aim to meet this standard:

Comparing Political Revolutions and/or Independence Movements – compare and contrast the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and one other revolution or independence movement that occurred in a region external to Europe from the standpoint of political, economic, and social causes and consequences. (Michigan Standards, p. 95)

This would be a pretty common approach in our current educational system.

But we have to remember that Khan built a series of videos and assessments that sequentially move through whole topics and courses. Not only that, he built a "dashboard" system that allows teachers to see the gaps a student currently has in real time—and that could be used to chart individualized progress towards individualized goals.

I think we are seeing the limits of thinking about technology as tool and starting to realize the necessity to embrace technology as a system. It might be that it's what pushes us over into a new way of thinking about school.

Who knows?

Oftentimes, as teachers, we find ourselves needing to move forward with our instruction so that we can “cover” all of the standards that we are expected to address through our curriculum. That, despite the fact that students might still not have mastered the material.

For some topics, it might be ok to move on before students have reached 100% mastery. But did we really think we could move on when we are dealing with such foundational skills as literacy and numeracy?

It's one thing if a child doesn't yet know the seven continents or the properties of matter. It's another if they are struggling to read. Having a series of videos, activities, and assessments—with real-time feedback and guidance—might provide the personalized approach to learning that would prevent us from having to teach topics and skills that some of our students are not yet ready to learn.

It is a premise of curriculum theory that determining what knowledge is of most worth is a political question. It will require deliberation and discussion.

But once a curricular framework is in place, it does seem like we need a more radically personalized instructional system than we currently have in place. Perhaps Khan will be the place where children go to learn reading and math? And perhaps school will be a place where we learn to go to work with others, to create art, and to solve the problems of the world.

What if the model developed by Greta were itself flipped? What if Fridays were devoted to learning fundamentals online (under the guidance of a parent or some other adult), and the other days of the week were spent in school trying to solve the great challenges our species now confronts?

What if didn’t need to strike against school in order to be involved in the real world?

Cycle Two Concluding Post: Working with Nature

Hi, everyone, and thank you for your work in cycle two. I really enjoyed reading your posts.

Now, I have to admit—as I have told several of you—that I essentially made up the term, “natural curriculum,” for the purposes of this course. (Though there is a hip-hop collective from the UK that takes that name, as well as this article I found from an author on “natural parenting.”)

This is not to say that the term is not helpful. I actually think it is—I think it points at something very real. Reading your posts helped me to clarify what that might be.

I asked in the opening post what curriculum might look like had schools never been invented. Your writing for this cycle helped me to think about that more deeply.

First off, as one of your peers noted, a natural curriculum is one built on patience—patience with children, patience with learning, patience with life. There’s a lot of folk wisdom there. A watched pot never boils—and perhaps an over-tested child never truly learns.

Many of you began your reflections with insights about how seemingly effortless learning is in the first year of life—smiling, rolling over, crawling, standing up, grasping objects, and eating solid foods. Not to mention the development of language. These are not instinctual behaviors, but they emerge from instinct—instinct that has been shaped and developed by thousands of micro-interactions between parents and children, between children and siblings, and between children and the environment (an environment carefully created by the parent).

I actually believe that reading and writing and adding and painting might be as "natural" as smiling and crawling and rolling over. I believe that, to some extent, our ability to overcomplicate things like reading is what makes them so hard (yes, children learned how to read before there were scripted reading curricula—though if you google “reading is a natural process” you will find lots of textbook companies trying to convince you it is not).

Perhaps, it’s because we force such behaviors upon children before they are ready that it appears we have to "teach" kids how to do these things. There’s nothing natural about teaching kids to read at age 5, 6, or 7—it is a cultural convention that this is when we start.

But what if we: create the conditions, model the behavior, and allow the instinct to communicate to develop? Could these things happen “of their own accord”—in a much more “natural” way than they currently do—for the vast majority of children?

Might adding be as natural as walking? Might reading be as natural as eating?

My point here is that nature and culture can’t be so easily teased apart. It's to say that, perhaps, a natural curriculum just means that we take the time to work with (the child’s) nature, not against it. It's to say that human intervention matters, but that human intervention is not "overcoming" nature—it's freeing nature to work in ways that are in harmony with encompassing systems. Reading should develop as children become interested in expanding their repertoire of communicative competence. What purpose could it serve, otherwise?

Our current curriculum is so fragmented that it takes a lot of team meetings to put it back together. Teachers bend over backwards to create interdisciplinary themes and projects. But don’t we have to do that because the curriculum broke life apart in the first place--into standards, learning outcomes, and activities? Why did we do that? Why not preserve the integrity of life and assume integration will naturally follow?

We saw in cycle one that Dewey thought the world of the child to be unified, living, and connected—but perhaps a bit shallow, and lacking continuity. The approach of traditional curriculum is to take that world and fragment it by putting it into subject matter categories. “This part of your world is math, this part is science, and this part is social studies.” (And, hence, EI are a science teacher’s concern.)

But is there another way? Could this be easier for us as teachers? Don’t babies and toddlers give us a clue as to how we might do this?

These are not new ideas. They are very old ideas. We can trace them back to the curricula of early human societies—as well as to famous educational reformers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey.

Perhaps we are reaching a moment in our planetary history where we might want to, once again, give them the attention they deserve.

Cycle One Concluding Post: Dandelions in the Spring

Thank you, everyone, for your outstanding work in our first cycle. I really enjoyed reading your work. Before I share with you some concluding thoughts on this cycle, let me introduce you to the diversity of our class.

We have four early elementary educators, four upper elementary educators, one middle school educator, five high school educators, and two folks working and studying in the university context. On the secondary level, we have expertise represented in the areas of social studies, math, science, music, and world languages (Spanish and Chinese). We have classmates working in all sorts of school settings, and in very diverse geographical regions: yes, we have ten Michiganders, but we also have classmates working in Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago, as well as abroad in China and Vietnam.

What a fun group. Thanks to each of you for being a part of this journey.

Almost everything we talked about in this cycle could be a bit misleading if we didn’t understand the strongly normative dimensions within which these conversations take place. Happiness is not momentary pleasure, but the deep joy and satisfaction that comes from loving the rights things in the right way. Growth is not just an increase in quantity, but also a particular refinement in the quality of the parts.

Indeed, education itself is a normative field. To become educated doesn’t just mean to grow and change and adapt, it means to grow and change and adapt in a way that is socially valued. As Dewey once noted, you can grow in your ability to steal and lie and murder, but that does not mean you are becoming more educated.

Curriculum is another such term. As teachers, we have been miseducated into thinking that curriculum is nothing more than the resources, the lessons, and the units that are actually only one part of the curricular whole. Curriculum, too, has a normative dimension.

Every curriculum contains within it a vision of what is worth learning, doing, and experiencing as a human being. We can’t teach everything. There is too much to choose from, and not enough time or human capacity in any case. History teachers might spend two weeks teaching about World War II—yet there are people who devote their entire lives learning about the topic and, still, there is always more to learn.

Simply put, curriculum is a method for determining what knowledge is of most worth. When teachers, or parents, or children stop and ask—Why are we learning this? Is this good for this child?—they are not deviating from the curriculum. They are practicing the method of curriculum! As one of our classmates put it, curriculum is more like love—something you can’t touch, but that is vitally present all the same.

Curriculum is a method for determining value. But it is also, it is true, that “what” of learning. It is, in Dewey’s terms, subject matter.

But we have to remember that all subject matter was once an experience for someone. We can teach children about the heliocentric model. Great. But couldn’t we say that Copernicus actually experienced the sun as the center around which the planets orbited? We can still have that experience, but it requires the teacher to set up a situation in which the child seeks to learn this information in the context of her life—rather than just having it told to her as a fact to be remembered on a test. Knowledge and information become the by-products of experience.

The great challenge, ironically, is that experience is somewhat hard to get in school. That is why, I think, so many children have so little to report about what happened in school each day. It was all routine, habit, and procedure—quite predictable. Experience—in its normative sense—comes about when there is uncertainty, disequilibrium, genuine desire, and the effort to expand life in a way that is morally, intellectually, and emotionally satisfying. Genuine experience is unforgettable—that meal, that vacation, that first time I saw you!

There is the lived experience of the child—somewhat narrow, but vital, whole, and intense. There is the mature experience that is embodied in the curriculum—logically organized, available for others under the right conditions, and tested through the ages. The job of the teacher is to take these two things—child and curriculum—and bring them into a living relationship by exploiting the experiential basis of the two.

It is not routine work. It cannot happen every day. But it can happen—just ask the child picking dandelions out on the playground, in rapture at the sights and sounds and smells of spring.

Cycle Four Introductory Post

Welcome to cycle four!

This cycle's readings are both timely and perennial. They are timely because of the continuing patterns of exclusion that gay, lesbian, and transgender children face in our society. According to the Human Rights Campaign:

LGBQ young people are more than twice as likely to feel suicidal, and over four times as likely to attempt suicide, compared to heterosexual youth . . . the rates may be especially high for bisexual teens . . . According to one study, a third of transgender youth have seriously considered suicide, and one in five has made a suicide attempt . . .

These are alarming statistics. People of my generation grew up with the tragedy of the Matthew Shepard case. And nearly ten years ago now, the tragic case of Tyler Clementi brought growing awareness to the links between bullying, social media, and LGBTQ mental health. The fact that such things can still happen in our country, some would say, speaks to the pressing need to address the issue of homophobia in our schools—as this week’s introductory reading from Erik Eckholm helps explain. 

As teachers, we perhaps now join our students in watching shows such as Glee, Modern Family, or Stranger Things—where issues of sexuality, gender identity, and sexual orientation are openly portrayed for a "primetime" audience. The first time I taught this course, gay marriage was not yet a reality—since 2015, it has become the law of the land. A major candidate for the US Presidency is an openly-gay, married man.

Responsive teaching and curriculum-making would seem to require that we help students sort through these issues, to think about the ways in which sex, love, and inclusion are played out in both families and nations. Pre-school children are asked to think about these issues: for example, when a classmate starts wearing dresses to school and asks to be called by a different name and set of pronouns. Elementary children are asked to think about these issues: for example, as they look around their schools and neighborhoods and realize that some men love other men, and some women love other women. Middle and high school children are asked to think about these issues as they themselves start to form sexual attachments that may or may not fit heteronormative assumptions.

Should the curriculum address controversial issues? By asking this question, in connection with these readings, am I somehow implying that queer sexuality is controversial? That it might be, in some cases, acceptable to sidestep these issues? That is, that there is any room for debate when it comes to the human rights of queer folx?

No, that is not my intent. 

Yet we must ask what approach to sexuality the schools will take. If sexuality education focuses on birth control and preventing unwanted pregnancies, isn't a very specific message being implied? If we never think about Joan of Arc or Hua Mulan in the context of their gender and sexual identity, have we left something out of history? If locker rooms and restrooms continue to enforce a gender binary, what message are we sending? It is in the context of these issues that I wish us to read the Thornton and Eisner pieces--both classics in the history of curricular thinking.

All of these difficult questions can and should be raised in the course of this week’s readings. But, as the readings this cycle should make clear, this week is as much about what we don’t say as what we do say—about our silences and omissions as well as our lectures and homilies.

Childhood should be preserved as something special, but to construct it as a time of pure innocence—and to thereby justify a curriculum that does not help students sort through the problems they bring into our classrooms—seems to me wrong. This week’s readings should ultimately challenge us to consider just how responsive our curriculum is to those children who walk into our lives each and every day.

Cycle Three Introductory Post

Coming on the heels of our exploration of our own humanity as it relates to our interconnections to the natural world, we now turn to a consideration of that most unnatural aspect of contemporary human life: the screen. 

As a parent of three children--ages 6, 10, and 12--I know how much of their life is spent before screens. I know how much of my 12-year-old's life is dominated by the pressing question of when he will finally get his first phone (not before ninth grade). I know that their future work will likely involve heavy doses of screen time, and I know that their future leisure time will also likely be heavily influenced by the technological innovations of the future. (Ready player one?)

I also know that their health and happiness will be largely influenced by their ability to get their relationship to technology right.

And so, in this cycle, we ask: What is the relationship between popular culture and curriculum? How can technology be used in education?

This question, I assume, no teacher would find either obvious or satisfactorily answerable. Do we ban all phones from the school, or do we responsibly integrate their use into our curriculum and instruction? Can youtube, wikipedia, and snapchat be responsibly integrated into the educational experience? Can virtual reality really prepare children for the real thing?

In this cycle’s first reading, we will learn about a school that has undertaken some pretty interesting curricular experiments. As the article notes, “there are elements of the school’s curriculum that look familiar--nightly independent reading assignments, weekly reading-comprehension packets and plenty of work with pencils and paper--and others that don’t. Quest to Learn (Q2L) students record podcasts, film and edit videos, play video games, blog avidly and occasionally receive video messages from aliens.”

There are many questions we could ask about such a curriculum; and, indeed, one’s gut reaction to such a curriculum is probably a good read of how one approaches curriculum more generally--do you sense an opportunity worth investigating here, or see nothing but a big waste of time? 

But what most interests me is that the Q2L curriculum blurs the line between content and skills, between the child’s interests and the state-mandated content, between technology and the humanities. Such approaches have been around for a long time, though rarely have they had such an optimistic glow about them.

This article will hopefully get us thinking--perhaps shake us out of our well worn assumptions that students need to go to classes each day, with names like math, science, language arts, and social studies. The division of the curriculum into subject-matter areas has been long in place, but has also often been challenged. 

Regardless of how we organize the school day, the curricular imperative still forces us to ask: What should we teach the children? That is, it forces us to confront the relationship between past and future, between either learning the heritage of the human species as it comes to us from the past, or between learning the knowledge and skills that will allow students to thrive in the future. 

As we move through the cycle, we next look at two of the leading stars in the world of TED--Salman Khan (of Khan Academy and the flipped classroom fame) and Ken Robinson (of "schools kill creativity" fame). I'm guessing you've seen these videos before. But I ask you to watch them again, and perhaps think about them in the context of this cycle. 

Are Khan and Robinson in agreement? Maybe. But if they diverge, where do they diverge? And where does technology and the globally connected world fit into all of this? Does Robinson's argument that we are medicating our kids so as to get them to ignore the world of information technology equal an endorsement of the learning potential of the online, interconnected world?

Finally, we end with two academic articles that firmly ground us in the world of research. First, an article from James Paul Gee that makes a highly compelling case for the gamification of schooling and, more specifically, what schools might learn from the ways in which video games embody the principles of the learning sciences. Second, we have a classic article from Jean Anyon--a pioneer in the theory of schools as instruments of social reproduction--on how the content of the curriculum is differently situated depending on the amount of money your parents make. 

What would it mean to take a school like Q2L to scale? Would it make the rich richer? Would it simply keep the poor "in their place"? 

Can we imagine a world in which children coming from low-income backgrounds spend their days on computers, learning through gaming? 

Or do we subtly expect that children from low-income backgrounds need to learn the types of dispositions and skills that will allow them to endure the low-wage, low-skill jobs that are part and parcel of the service industry?

Cycle Two Introductory Post

What might a "natural curriculum" look like?

Before we get to the lessons, the tests, the grades, the report cards, and the rules of formalized education, in institutional settings, is there anything that might serve as a prior foundation? If society had not invented schools, what would curriculum look like, and how would it be enacted?

One way to think about this question is by exploring the idea of parents as the first teachers. There is a long history of doing this--assuming that the ideal school is a sort of family, and the ideal teacher is a substitute parent. In some ways, this was Dewey's view of the matter. For as he famously noted, "what the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.” Parental wisdom was, for Dewey, the standard by which pedagogical relationships were measured.

If we start at the beginning of life, is it fair to say that food is our first curriculum? And if that food is milk, how does the nature of the alimentary relationship put us on a trajectory of growth and development? With these questions, I want us to approach the history of breastfeeding in this wonderfully interesting article by Jill Lepore. As we read, I think we can productively think about the analogy between food and curriculum.

As children grow, parents make decisions about the content of their child's everyday experiences--deciding, in this way, how much freedom the child can have, what degree of risk is acceptable, and how failure and pain should figure into life. In this way, I want us to think about recent trends in parenting and childhood that have removed children from the natural environment and rendered unsupervised play and exploration a privilege of the few. We will do so through an article by Jessica McCrory Calarco and the introduction to a wonderful book by Richard Louv.

Next, I want us to look at two articles--by Jardine and Kissling and Bell--that explore what and how we can learn about our relationship to the Earth through formalized schooling. These two articles take us into spaces where we learn not just about ourselves as human beings, but see ourselves as earthen creatures, inextricably intertwined with our environment and the rest of the universe, living out relationships of inter-being and inter-becoming.

When all is said and done, we are left to ponder the deepest truths of our lives--our journey from ashes to ashes, where, in the words of Dr. King, "all life is inter-related. All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

To end this cycle, I turn to the Time Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg. She describes her disability, her history, and her hopes and fears. It is, I think, a fitting place to pause as we move through this year of perfect vision, 20/20. 

We must come and see our past, our present, and our future--working through our strengths and weaknesses, our courage and vulnerability, on this Earth, our common home, with all of humanity, our common family.