What is Curriculum? Cycle One
Many would say that curriculum encompasses all the material students learn, the methods used to teach the students, and the order the material should be taught. However, one teacher told me that good teachers understand that “you are the curriculum”. The teacher, with their knowledge and expertise, paired with their knowledge of the students and their background knowledge, can put together a much better curriculum than one that is mandated by the school or the county. Teachers are teaching students, not the material. Each student is unique and may need something different. Ideally, all students should be challenged at the level they are at: the curriculum should not be too challenging or too easy.
Of course, this is difficult to attain with one teacher and many students in a classroom, but teachers should have that mindset in order to serve the students best. If teachers consider themselves as being the curriculum, they will be pushed to consider what they know and what their resources are to meet each student’s needs apart from the curriculum that they have (in most cases) been given by their school. This consideration must especially be considered when serving students with special needs, like Donovan with a traumatic brain injury. Teachers should be especially creative and innovative when working with students of such a wide range of skills and needs.
The purpose of curriculum is more difficult to describe. As Noddings in his book on “Happiness and Education” postulates, one of the goals of education should be happiness. I agree in part, but one must ask what one’s definition of happiness is. To many students, happiness would involve having no classes and only recess. There is also the notion of a short-term happiness (for example, eating chocolate) and a long-term happiness (for example, winning a running race after training very hard). Students often struggle with being able to have the long view in mind when they consider what makes them “happy”, and they make poor decisions regarding happiness as a result.
The purpose, on the surface, is for the student to master the curriculum’s objectives. But the ultimate purpose of the curriculum, I think, is for students to be equipped to reach their full potential and be able to pursue whatever they are passionate about. As a high school math teacher, I found it interesting to read about the perspective from the articles we read on mathematics. I think mathematics is very important, and should be available to almost everyone to learn (the exception being students taking higher level math who really should be pursuing trade school or something similar). Yes, many may not use some mathematics going forward, but I think math is valuable to learn in and of itself. It helps teach people how to think and problem solve. Moreover, without learning math, students are not exposed to if they DO enjoy it enough to go into a field involving mathematics.
Students should, ideally have a close relationship with the curriculum. This is difficult to attain as a teacher, but if students can relate to the curriculum and see that it is valuable to them and what they are interested in, they will be more engaged and “buy in” to their schooling as being very important. That being said, I think it is still important for teachers to maintain a structure as well as objectives and goals for their students to attain in the context of making curriculum more relatable to students.
Hi Sarah,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post! I enjoyed reading it!
I love this notion that "you"--the teacher--"are the curriculum." In fact, I might even push it beyond what you do.
The teacher as curriculum certainly means that the teacher is, in the words, a curricular gatekeeper. Everything that is taught is filtered through the attitudes, habits, perspectives of the teacher. It is embodied and enacted through the teacher's pedagogical skills.
But teacher as curriculum could also mean that, literally, it is the teacher that literally embodies the learning that the student takes on. If the teacher is joyful, the student realizes that a joyful way of living is appropriate. If the teacher is cruel to those who are marginalized or less fortunate, the student learns that the world is of that manner. If the teacher models ways of thinking through problems, or certain ways of framing problems--certain discursive or narrative ways of approaching things--the student might take those on as well.
I think students even learn important things about how to dress, or what it means to be a mature man or woman, from a teacher. Ultimately, we have to question whether or not all knowledge does not come down to its embeddedness in human relations. As the saying goes, "I don't care what you know until I know that you care." Caring relations--or there opposite--is the ground for human knowing and understanding.
I would love for you to engage a bit more deeply with Noddings' notion of happiness. It is, as I think you can probably guess, deeply normative. She cares about the joy or happiness that is not dependent upon getting what you want. It assumes that there is a common meaning to happiness--perhaps similar to Plato or Dewey's notion--which is doing what are uniquely suited to do. Finding your deepest desire. Or in religious language, finding your vocation. We can all have different vocations, but our happiness most certainly depends on finding that vocation and living it out as fully as possible.
Finding our happiness might mean we are exposed to lots of things--math, yes, for sure. But also guitar or Mandarin or Italian cooking or woodworking. So I would love to see you to continue to explore your thoughts on the social context for math--why it is universally required and whether or not that is good for mathematics education.
Thanks for your post!
Kyle