Cycle 5: What constitutes a successful curriculum?

To start with an aside - I created a Wordle for this blog. I noticed the words Curriculum an Student were prominent, which is appropriate for our course on the Social Context of Curriculum. I must be doing something right!

I loved the readings for this week, after initially being overwhelmed by the scope of the topics that they covered. The story about Geoffrey Canada's lauded "Harlem's Children Zone" made me feel a bit of smugness - ah hah, public schools are the answer! I realized after reading more that Mr. Canada is in fact doing a great job with his schools. Then, I discovered that Deborah Maier is a brilliant, independent thinking educator, and I connected with her thoughts and writing (perhaps because her birthday (April 6th) is near mine (April 2nd)). Nel Noddings struck me as a worthy contemporary of John Dewey, which alone is an amazing accomplishment. Finally, Elliott Eisner's writing initially bored me and seemed unoriginal, until I slowly felt my thoughts from this semester coalesce around the latter half of the chapter from his book "What does it mean to say a school is doing well?" To attempt to address that question and "What constitutes a successful curriculum?" are the aims of this post.

Dr. Eisner's thesis is that the "rationalization" of schools has lead to the loss of their authentic purpose and direction. The result of this is an educational system with "extrinsically defined educational targets that have a specified quantitative value." These targets are damaging to public education because of what they omit - interactions, community-building, different perspectives and different beliefs. These targets are also damaging because the "quantitative value" at the end of the tunnel is not guaranteed to be there, or to even hold value. Sometimes students who do everything right find themselves unhappy and living at home. So for Eisner, these targets began when we rationalized our curriculum, and focused our attention on standardization and testing. When we question the outcomes of our targets, we realize that what is called a good school may not truly be so, while a mediocre school may better serve our society by educating adaptable, well-rounded students.

Dr. Noddings' essential question to educators is simple: "We continually ask, if you are aiming at X, why are you doing Y? How does Y fit with X?" This questions is just a bit revolutionary. I wanted to yell at my computer screen as I read her spot-on questions to educators about our aims. Noddings writes that economic superiority is the aim of our current school system. So the next question becomes, what are those in favor of standards really aiming at? I felt my thoughts from this whole semester coming together as I read more from Nel Noddings: "The best school is that which provides for its students the opportunity and support to utilize the talents of students in a socially constructive, satisfying, manner."

Ms. Otterman's article in the NY Times, Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Problems, was interesting to me, as I visited one of Mr. Geoffrey Canada's schools during a North Carolina Teaching Fellows trip to New York City while I was a student at UNC Asheville. I was impressed. Mr. Canada has a broad definition of what makes a school: his Harlem schools seek to serve the society they are in, not just a slice of that society. I disagree with what researchers into Mr. Canada's schools wrote about achieving Mr. Canada's goals at a lesser cost. The challenge is to reform society so that schools are recognized as the tool that ensures a successful society.

Dr. Deborah Meier

Dr. Maier is a brilliant author with whom I related to instantly. Maier writes that a good school for anyone is a little like Kindergartenm and a little like a good post-graduate program. I loved this line. Maier then touches on the hard-to-define aspect of why a charter school works where a public school doesn't - because students and parents come charters by choice. She presciently writes that because of this choice, "at least some modest basis for individual trust is built in" between parents, students, and the community of teachers and administrators at school. I wonder how we can adapt this element of choice to our Public School system, because of the empowering effect for parents and students and the "modest basis for individual trust"

Another line I liked a lot relates "the small world of the child to the world of large ideas of the adult," to paraphrase John Dewey a bit. Maier writes that the history of the world was at least as complicated as the history of her family. This is so insightful, because all of us know how complicated our families are: the interpersonal dynamics, the history and the tradition. These things are difficult for anyone but someone in the family to understand. So, of course human history is infinitely more complicated than that of our own families, but we act, and teach, as if the opposite were true. Maier writes, perhaps without some needed instruction, that teachers need to ask these questions about our curriculum.

www.studybio.com

I believe these are now accepted characteristics of successful schools. So, what is a successful curriculum? I can offer to the reader of this post an anecdote and a website I created - Study Bio! - in the Teaching Through Design class by Dr. Punya Mishra and Ms. Kristen Kereluik. The work I did for the 'Diversity' tab was informed by work we have done in this class. I felt like I was able to show my students snippets of the world I like to occupy online; using Google Documents, Twitter and website design. I was empowered by the writing of John Dewey to focus first on engaging student's interest, and only thereafter to teach content. That this technique worked - and that one of our finest Educational Psychologists provided a philosophy and psychology of why - was so empowering to me.

Since living together means we have to make sacrifices so that we all benefit, school should be the ground-floor of our Democratic society. School can be the tool that points us in the right direction as individuals and a group. So, schools are important to the extent that a society is interested in involving all of its citizens for their and society's benefit. Thus, school should seek to serve each individual with the aim of their satisfying engagement with society in their school years and adulthood. The successful curriculum should be broad enough to allow for professional teachers to attempt the challenge of bringing a student from youth to a worthy and meaningful adulthood in society.

I refer one final time to "Science Teacher Doyle" who writes this week about a class trip. "For at least one day, I do not fret over my biggest classroom fear--killing curiosity." Perhaps in a society where our curriculum is muddled and our aims are obfuscated, I can cast away my fears of bad evaluations and test scores: my aim is to engage students with their education, to the extent that they grow into successful adults. So much of that transformation is necessarily personal and silent. I think this is part of the reason why it is so difficult to say what constitutes a successful curriculum.