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.
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