Cycle One: What is curriculum? What is its purpose?

My initial thoughts in consideration of these questions jump to text books and mandated curriculum guides. I think that for most teachers what we teach is so specifically mandated that curriculum is reduced to that. Upon further reflection and considerable reading about the idea, however, I have been able to think about curriculum in a broader sense. William Schubert (1996) names curriculum as “what is worth knowing,” and expands upon the root of the word coming from the word “currere,” associating it with “the act of running the race” (p.169). This broadens the context of curriculum quite a bit. In these terms it truly can’t be contained in a single document, as the course that individuals will run in their lives is varied by so many factors.

I like Wilson’s view of curriculum as “anything and everything that teaches a lesson.” It’s important to remember that not all learning is done in the classroom, nor even in the school building. Students learn through every interaction they have at home, in the community, and through the various forms of media they encounter as well as at school. However, thinking of curriculum in this broad of terms makes it difficult to draft any sort of national or even local curriculum guide that would be useful in maintaining a sort of uniform education across the country.

Obviously some question whether such uniformity is at all necessary, if it wouldn’t be better to simply follow the interests of the individual children in a class and allow their curiosity to naturally guide them to discoveries in different disciplines simultaneously, in an uninterrupted way that mimics the way discovery happens in the real world. These same people assert “if a skill or body of knowledge is indispensable for a given project, it will emerge as a learning need in the course of working on that project” (Schubert, 1996, p.174). I wonder, though, how likely this is to happen if, say, only one student is lacking that skill or body of knowledge. Ideally education would be individualized enough that the student would get a chance to catch up with that skill, but I don’t find this likely to happen.  More likely, in my opinion, the one who didn’t have that skill would be the one left behind, struggling to gain as much as his peers from the lesson at hand, given his missing understanding of something it's assumed the students already know (and in fact the majority do.)

Schubert mentions the fact that even with a strict curriculum guide, the learning that takes place will be different in different classes because of personal preferences and personality of the teacher (p. 174). I agree with this, but I think if the understood curriculum task is that students will be able to use the past tense in Spanish, for example, however they get to that point, two classes with different teachers will produce students who can use the past tense in Spanish. However, if we followed student interest only, and the students in one class really had no interest in talking about the past, but wanted to focus on the future, or hypothetical situations, when they mixed the following year with a class that had spent weeks practicing the past tense, their differing skills and abilities would make it difficult to find a common ground on which to continue to the mutual benefit of both sets of students.

This isn’t to say that I think curriculum needs to be rigid and ignore student interest, but I think it will be more effective if it has some kind of agreed upon starting ground that is in common across schools. The way teachers go about meeting these curricular goals can be tailored to the individual students in his/ her class, and that’s where student interest and difference can be taken into consideration in order to make that learning meaningful for a particular group of students.

Additionally, I believe curriculum is constantly changing, and written curriculum needs to be continuously adapted. Especially in the technology age where the world itself is changing faster than it ever has before, what is important for students to learn needs to be re-evaluated, to consider whether things are still relevant for students to learn and develop the skills they’ll need to be successful in their uncertain futures. As in Donovan’s case, what he needed to learn had to depend upon his probable future. Unfortunately in his case, as he grew older his developmental level didn’t change much, so neither did his probable future, but for other students the reality of their future will change frequently during the span of time in which they are a part of the public education system.

This leads me to the second question, the purpose of curriculum. I don’t see the purpose of curriculum as constricting, as a certain body of people’s beliefs about what is important to the exclusion of other areas of studies. Schubert’s traditionalist speaker, for example, admits to his weakness in classics outside of Western Europe, but doesn’t try to claim that nothing outside of his area of expertise is valid. Rather, he claims that he would like to learn more about other areas as well; he is open to diversity (170).

Instead of this constricting vision, I see curriculum as a loose-fitting guide that can be adapted to meet various needs and realities, but that is vitally important in its role of ensuring consistency and quality in education across different types of schools. I think this is important so that students coming from disadvantaged areas are not stuck in those disadvantages. Certain parts of our nation, unfortunately, have lower standards for education than others, and it’s not fair to the children of those areas to be held to lower standards and therefore probably be provided with fewer options later in life. Written curriculum holds schools and individual teachers accountable to standards that, while they may fall short of the intended goal in the end, at least attempt to promote equal opportunities for children. Susan M. Drake and Rebecca C. Burns (Meeting the Standards Through Integrated Curriculum), explain that, “Although accountability mandates require that we cover the standards, teachers have the freedom to expand on or connect to other standards to make them more meaningful.” We don’t have to be held back by standards and mandated curriculum, we can use them as a tool to enhance student learning while maintaining accountability.