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Curriculum Visions: Second Printing
Curriculum Visions challenges the singular, guiding vision that has dominated Western educational thought for the past four centuries, from Peter Ramus to Ralph Tyler and beyond. Influenced by the spirit of John Dewey, Curriculum Visions moves beyond his ghost to see what he never saw – a playful integration of the scientific, the storied, and the spiritful. In so doing, Curriculum Visions asks each of us to develop our own curricular vision, based on the logic of reason, the personality and culture of society, and the awesomeness and mystery of creation.
310 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2002
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January 19, 2011
I struggled my way through the first half of this before realising I only had it on 7 day loan – oops, needs to go back today. Although some of the ideas are terribly interesting, most of it is quite hard going. This is particularly true of Noel Gough’s introduction. The other intro by William Doll is much easier going and has an abundance of fascinating ideas.
I come to this book with serious concerns. Firstly, that the whole idea of curriculum is something that needs a good long hard look. The issue is that from what I have seen of the couple of curricula in place in Victoria (VELS and the new ACARA) they are so broad that they exclude virtually nothing. That is, a teacher, in as much as they can think of something they would like to teach, can pretty well teach it and still meet the requirements of these curricula. Perhaps the relationship between curricula and exclusion of material isn’t immediately obvious, but then if a curriculum does not exclude anything then it ‘includes’ everything – and it is somewhat hard to teach ‘everything’.
This is the problem with the humanities / history curricula I’ve looked at – there is so much that needs to be ‘covered’ that there is no time for the students to really get a chance to digest what they are being force-feed. I mentioned to someone last year that while I was teaching WW2 history I felt like one of those French farmers pouring wheat down the gullets of his geese. No time to chew, no time to consider, no time to argue or debate – just swallow a mountain of ‘facts’ and hope some of them regurgitate back to front of mind come the exam or essay or test. History may be ‘a contested debate’ but not in high school.
These articles are ‘haunted by the ghost’ of John Dewey. I love thinking about what Dewey would have made of much of the post-modern language that these essays are constructed in – there are even references to Derrida! But at heart Dewey wanted an education system and curriculum that would inspire inquiry and provide a basis for democratic engagement and citizenship (in the broadest and most comprehensive meaning of that word).
Doll’s introduction is fascinating – not least for his linking of Taylorism (Fordism) with industrial era notions of what a curriculum should be – that is, curriculum (originally a concept that came from Calvin for the Latin for race-track) came to fit with the new factory methods and time and motion studies, in which a goal is set and a process is constructed to meet that goal.
This is education via dualities – either/or statements. Dewey’s vision is contrasted with this and is presented as a ‘both/and’ – I generally hate these kinds of simple-minded schema, but I do think they are onto something here in a sense. For Dewey education has no end beyond itself – it isn’t so much a path towards, but rather the path in itself. This moving beyond ends – towards engagement, I guess – is central to the ideas in this book and therefore the ideas they espouse about how curricula might look – ought to look. It is really interesting that Dewey thought that basing curricula on criteria external to the child/teacher/learning nexus would only lead to mediocrity, another book I’m reading at the moment makes it abundantly clear that the No Child Left Behind policy introduced in the US (and being slavishly followed here in Australia) struggles even to achieve mediocrity. What happens when people not only take undergraduate economics theory seriously, but also apply it to education. (And what happens? Disaster!)
Dewey’s vision is probably best summed up by what this book constantly refers to as currere (Latin verb for ‘to run’). Basically, curriculum is most often seen as a noun – but if it is to be transformative and focus on the child as a learner then it ought to be considered a verb – that is, a series of actions rather than a script of goals to be achieved.
He then provides a set of metaphors for Curriculum – metaphors all beginning with the letter C (for no discernible reason – which is actually always my favourite reason): curriculum as currere, complexity, cosmology, conversation and community.
In discussing a book so opposed to ‘either/or’ thinking – I’m going to sum up what I got out of this book with a ‘more or less’ false dichotomy. The world divides into two great classes of people: those who think education should be engaging and at least in part consider the interests of the child; and those who think that education is a series of skills and facts that every child needs to learn and that these are documented (and documentable) in a curriculum in order and to a particular time frame. Skills learnt now to be used by the child sometime later.
The second view has much appeal – so it is a shame that it is such a remarkably inefficient way to teach children. The reason why it is so inefficient is that it relies on children being ‘ready’ to learn – it believes learning is difficult and it believes in discrete skills that can be brought to bear on the child in much the same way that discrete skills can be systematised, isolated and brought to bear on various materials to make a car. But people are meaning making organisms and learn best when given the opportunity to make sense of what they are learning.
I will probably come back to this later in the year, but the treadmill of reading has started and I’m already nearly falling off the ever-approaching end of the conveyor belt. (Did I mention Fordism? Perhaps as a learning strategy it only works at University level…)
I come to this book with serious concerns. Firstly, that the whole idea of curriculum is something that needs a good long hard look. The issue is that from what I have seen of the couple of curricula in place in Victoria (VELS and the new ACARA) they are so broad that they exclude virtually nothing. That is, a teacher, in as much as they can think of something they would like to teach, can pretty well teach it and still meet the requirements of these curricula. Perhaps the relationship between curricula and exclusion of material isn’t immediately obvious, but then if a curriculum does not exclude anything then it ‘includes’ everything – and it is somewhat hard to teach ‘everything’.
This is the problem with the humanities / history curricula I’ve looked at – there is so much that needs to be ‘covered’ that there is no time for the students to really get a chance to digest what they are being force-feed. I mentioned to someone last year that while I was teaching WW2 history I felt like one of those French farmers pouring wheat down the gullets of his geese. No time to chew, no time to consider, no time to argue or debate – just swallow a mountain of ‘facts’ and hope some of them regurgitate back to front of mind come the exam or essay or test. History may be ‘a contested debate’ but not in high school.
These articles are ‘haunted by the ghost’ of John Dewey. I love thinking about what Dewey would have made of much of the post-modern language that these essays are constructed in – there are even references to Derrida! But at heart Dewey wanted an education system and curriculum that would inspire inquiry and provide a basis for democratic engagement and citizenship (in the broadest and most comprehensive meaning of that word).
Doll’s introduction is fascinating – not least for his linking of Taylorism (Fordism) with industrial era notions of what a curriculum should be – that is, curriculum (originally a concept that came from Calvin for the Latin for race-track) came to fit with the new factory methods and time and motion studies, in which a goal is set and a process is constructed to meet that goal.
This is education via dualities – either/or statements. Dewey’s vision is contrasted with this and is presented as a ‘both/and’ – I generally hate these kinds of simple-minded schema, but I do think they are onto something here in a sense. For Dewey education has no end beyond itself – it isn’t so much a path towards, but rather the path in itself. This moving beyond ends – towards engagement, I guess – is central to the ideas in this book and therefore the ideas they espouse about how curricula might look – ought to look. It is really interesting that Dewey thought that basing curricula on criteria external to the child/teacher/learning nexus would only lead to mediocrity, another book I’m reading at the moment makes it abundantly clear that the No Child Left Behind policy introduced in the US (and being slavishly followed here in Australia) struggles even to achieve mediocrity. What happens when people not only take undergraduate economics theory seriously, but also apply it to education. (And what happens? Disaster!)
Dewey’s vision is probably best summed up by what this book constantly refers to as currere (Latin verb for ‘to run’). Basically, curriculum is most often seen as a noun – but if it is to be transformative and focus on the child as a learner then it ought to be considered a verb – that is, a series of actions rather than a script of goals to be achieved.
He then provides a set of metaphors for Curriculum – metaphors all beginning with the letter C (for no discernible reason – which is actually always my favourite reason): curriculum as currere, complexity, cosmology, conversation and community.
In discussing a book so opposed to ‘either/or’ thinking – I’m going to sum up what I got out of this book with a ‘more or less’ false dichotomy. The world divides into two great classes of people: those who think education should be engaging and at least in part consider the interests of the child; and those who think that education is a series of skills and facts that every child needs to learn and that these are documented (and documentable) in a curriculum in order and to a particular time frame. Skills learnt now to be used by the child sometime later.
The second view has much appeal – so it is a shame that it is such a remarkably inefficient way to teach children. The reason why it is so inefficient is that it relies on children being ‘ready’ to learn – it believes learning is difficult and it believes in discrete skills that can be brought to bear on the child in much the same way that discrete skills can be systematised, isolated and brought to bear on various materials to make a car. But people are meaning making organisms and learn best when given the opportunity to make sense of what they are learning.
I will probably come back to this later in the year, but the treadmill of reading has started and I’m already nearly falling off the ever-approaching end of the conveyor belt. (Did I mention Fordism? Perhaps as a learning strategy it only works at University level…)
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