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.