Cycle Three: Should the curriculum address controversial issues?

I think a more important question than should the curriculum address controversial issues is how curriculum should address controversial issues. While it might make some teachers or parents more comfortable to avoid certain issues, it leaves important gaps in student’s education, and can affirm negative views on the topic by labeling them as taboo. As adults, Joel Burns reminds us that “it is never acceptable for us to be the cause of any child to feel unloved or worthless.” I think most teachers would take this statement as a given, but sometimes the way we overlook issues in our curriculum or even within the classroom contributes (even if it’s unintentionally) to a child feeling less loved or worthy. Creating opportunities for dialogue about touchy issues and having clear expectations about what is and isn’t appropriate language to express can go a long way towards showing struggling kids that they do matter and deserve to be treated with respect.

Curriculum has gone a long way to correct oversights of this type with issues like women’s and civil rights, but is still lacking in other areas, and in some cases seems to even be taking a turn in the opposite direction. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill, now called the “Classroom Protection Act” is back in Tennessee. The bill would forbid discussing “anything inconsistent with natural reproduction” in grades K-8. Honestly I don’t know how this can be completely avoided. Students with same-sex parents wouldn’t be able to talk about their families in the classroom in the way other children do. Instead of teachers finding ways to make students feel comfortable discussing diversity, it takes this away completely.

Tammi Shulz, a parent opposed to lessons in tolerance as a part of school curriculum, claims, “I just don’t think it’s great to talk about homosexuality with five year olds,” and many parents echo her concern that children shouldn’t be exposed to such issues at such young ages. Something that Mary Cowhey reminds readers in her essay on “Creating a gay-and lesbian-friendly classroom” is that “We are not talking about ‘sexuality’ when we discuss gay and lesbian issues any more than we are discussing sexuality when we read Cinderella or any other story with all heterosexual characters.” While some parents still may not feel comfortable with their children discussing these issues at an early age, they can’t keep them in a bubble, and chances are good that at some point their child will meet a student who has a non-traditional family. Parents generally treat their children to share, to play nicely with their classmates, to treat others as they’d like to be treated, and they should want their children to learn to extend those values to all of their classmates, regardless of their background. This means having “controversial” discussions with young kids.

One of the big ways (unrelated to curriculum) that teachers fail students is by failing to react to homophobic name-calling. Leonore Gordon claims that “if adults criticize other forms of name-calling but ignore antigay remarks, children are quick to conclude that homophobia is acceptable,” much in the same way that when we fail to recognize something in our curriculum children are likely to conclude that it is unimportant or unacceptable. This is an area that I am struggling with this year. I have a class of mostly ninth grade boys who see it as their mission in life to taunt each other more than the others. I have tried to be clear with them that it’s unacceptable, but it’s so constant with them, their first reaction after anyone says anything is to ridicule him, that if I stopped to address every single comment I would never get anything else taught. I guess it comes down to how important it is that I teach these boys to respect each other, but this area has me frustrated this year. They are all friends, and don’t see why it’s not okay for them to talk to each other like that, it’s like it’s all a big joke to them (and to their parents.)

My school, like others, made a push to promote anti-bullying and spread awareness about doing the right thing and standing up for people who are being bullied. All of the 9^th graders participated in a Rachel’sChallenge event, and we showed videos and had discussions in homeroom, but none of that seems to have made a difference with these kids. I guess it’s an example of disjointed curriculum attempt that’s not integrated into student’s lives so they don’t take hold of it.

Another area I had never considered is talking about HIV/ AIDS at school. I’m almost to the end of my master’s with a focus on multicultural education and had never read anything on this topic. It fits well with homosexuality, because again the issue many parents are afraid of is talking about sex, and the (unfounded) fear that talking about it will somehow make kids more likely do it. The Silin article brings up problems with The New York State AIDS Instructional Guide, which breaks down talking about HIV/AIDS in the classroom, starting with how it isn’t transmitted in 4-6 grades, and not talking about how it is transmitted until 7-8 grades. This could be confusing, for kids, but talking about how it’s transmitted means talking about sex, and I can understand why parents aren’t comfortable with their 9-12 year-olds talking about that outside the home.

I remember when my little sister’s 4^th grade class read The Giver, and my mom was uncomfortable with some of the references in the book. I can only imagine how she would have reacted to my 4^th grade sister learning about the transmission of AIDS at school. Some parents (my mom being one of them) want their kids to hear about things from them; parents like Tammi Shulz are worried that the views expressed at school might not line up with the values the family wants to impart on the child. I think both parents and teachers have to recognize, that with the reality of our current time things have changed, and what we consider to be an age of innocence might need to change to protect kids in the long run. If teachers handle topics with discretion and parents stay involved and continue the dialogue at home we can benefit from controversy in the curriculum, remembering, as Silin put it, that “not all knowledge is about control.”

Cycle Two: What should schools teach? How should they be held accountable?

 It’s hard to determine the answers to these questions, because the second depends on the first, and the first always leads us to the question of who has the right to decide that answer. Hirsch, for example, in his chapter “Cultural Literacy and the Schools” claims that, “many more students could become highly literate if they were presented with the right sort of curriculum” (p.116). However, despite my Bachelor’s degree, work towards my Master’s, and experience living abroad, according to Hirsch’s standard I would be culturally illiterate, based on the fact that John brown evokes nothing for me, (certainly not “a whole network of lively traits”), and that I couldn’t even tell you that Falstaff is fat and likes to eat and drink (p.127). I think Hirsch would take this to mean I had earned a subpar education, and probably would be horrified to know that I minored in English. It would be both impractical and impossible to cover every work of Shakespeare, though, and in my English classes we read Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet, not Henry IV. I don’t think this makes me in any way illiterate, nor has it hindered my life in any way. In this day and age I don’t think it is necessary to memorize long lists of facts, because we have Google. 

Jonathan Wai disagrees, quoting David Lohman that “how well we reason depends on how much we know.” This makes sense of course, but if you’re reading a book or find yourself in a situation where you missed something because of a cultural reference, you can use technology to find the answer within seconds and be able to make the connection. Wai also quotes Benjamin Stein, saying today’s youth “are not mentally prepared to continue the society because they basically do not understand the society well enough to value it.” This ignores the fact that society is changing at a more rapid pace than it ever has, thanks to technology. Today’s youth may not be as well versed in the things that past generations would mark as vital for cultural literacy, but if you go back even farther I think you’d find that their predecessors found them equally lacking. Add globalization to this, the way cultures are blending and interacting more and more, and the feasibility of compiling a list of things someone should know becomes even more improbable.

While I don’t think a strict body of knowledge that must be learned is necessary, I do think there are some things which technology cannot replace. Al Doyle, teacher at Quest to Learn, for example, calls spelling “outdated.” Yes, students have spell check available to them, but students still need to have a basic understanding of spelling in order for spell check to recognize which word they’re trying to use. And what about homophones? Uniform spelling is necessary for mass communication, and to get to the stage of someone (or some machine) editing your spelling, you must have some handle on the skill.

Basically I think students should be taught to use resources available to them to solve problems. These resources will likely include Google and spell check, but the still need basic knowledge to use those tools. Even though they have Google, they have to be able to determine whether the information they’ve found is trustworthy or not, and what to do with it next. The what of what we teach, in my opinion, becomes a lot less important than the how and the why.

In this way I really appreciated the article about video games and learning- they present problems that students must work (often collaboratively and creatively) to solve. And while I’m torn about the idea of making school “fun” simply to avoid kids dropping out because they’re “bored” (honestly, many jobs are boring, and most bosses unfortunately won’t work to try to make their work more fun), Paul Gee points out that gaming is not always fun, there’s a lot of failure involved. Will Wright calls it “failure-based learning” which is absolutely right, kids are willing to fail over and over again trying to find a way to beat a game, and still love the game, unlike the feelings that evolve if they fail continuously at school.

Data shows that the Quest to Learn school students didn’t perform any better on standardized tests than their peers from traditional schools despite how much funding this innovative design requires, but I think it’s unfair to judge the success and value of this experience based on traditional testing. Students might not perform any better on a paper-pencil type of test, but given the opportunity to apply the knowledge in a more performance-based assessment, I bet they’d outperform their peers. This would be an interesting study.

I know kids love games (Yesterday my students were working on a project using imovie, and after finishing one student asked me if he could play a math video game until class was over. I was surprised he was so excited about practicing math, but said yes, please do.), but I lack the competence with gaming and programming as well as the time it would take to implement the methods used at Quest to Learn, so I searched the internet to see how other Spanish teachers are using video games. At first I found very little, just that the market for Spanish video games (not the educational sort) is expanding. Then I found this thesis  on using video games like The Sims 2 in foreign language classes. I have considered using this game in class before, but haven’t gone anywhere with it because of logistics (buying/ installing the game, how to monitor student progress.) I also decided to check out Alice, a program mentioned in the reading about Quest to Learn school. It claims it’s for beginners, so it might be something I try out this summer, but at this point I don’t have time for it. Something else I stumbled upon while doing this research is Inanimate Alice, a digital story-telling website. I’d love to learn how to make stories like that, but my students aren’t advanced enough to really benefit from the ones offered on the website.

The idea of video games as assessments in themselves intrigues me, and I wonder about the uncovered possibilities there. I don’t think standardized tests as we’ve known them make sense in our technology-rich future, and while some tests (like AP, that are delving deeper instead of trying to memorize so many facts) are making positive changes, others seem to be digressing. (Like Kentucky assessing music with a paper-pencil standardized exam when music teachers have been using performance-based assessment all along.)

In my last post I struggled with this same idea- that we need some sort of accountability measure, but that it shouldn’t be restrictive. I know my stance is still vague, but I still think that’s where I’m at. We need to find a way to test what students are able to do, to prove that they can think critically, as they’ll need to in their real futures- and this probably won’t involve a lot of rambling off memorized facts, so why should tests?