Cycle One Reflection

My thoughts and ideas on curriculum and what it means in education has changed often over the course of my undergrad, through half a decade in education, and now during my Masters program. Depending on the job I was in or the school/program I was working with, I often found myself at time’s with a firmly Dewey mindset of “The map is not a substitute for personal experience...it does not take the place of an actual journey” as a I adapted the curriculum in places that allowed me more freedom to focus on the values and skills that I believe to be the most important in creating students who would become empathetic, productive, active members of their communities. Other times, I found myself in schools that required me to teach a curriculum with preset ideas of what skills were important, regardless of the student population before me, and seemed to believe that equity in education meant we were to have one set method of teaching that appealed to all students. I often found myself caught between the conflicting ideologies of my usually idealistic and progressive education studies with the realities of many school cultures where test scores, meeting specific standards in a timely manner, and inclusion at all costs seemed more important and any individual student ever was.

In Kieran Egan’s “What is Curriculum,” he has a quote that says “To know what curriculum should contain requires a sense of what the contents are for.” When I read this, I was reminded of my first year as a full time teacher at an over 90% low income minority charter school in Boston. I was teaching ninth grade civics to almost exclusively black and brown students with an entire unit based around the ideas of Enlightenment philosophy that they would be tested on with an assessment made at the network level (we had three charter schools in our network). The content/curriculum that I was given made not connections to the realities of students' lives, and the ideas I was being told to drive home felt useless when I was thinking about what Civics education is supposed to be for. It didn’t feel like the curriculum content were for anything except testing the students about some things that were arbitrarily deemed important, and what good is that?

Having taught social studies and often coming across curriculum problems like this, I have fortunately had ample opportunities to include what Dewey in The Child and the Curriculum stated as “the need of reinstating into experience the subject matter of the studies or branches of learning.” A line like Rousseau’s “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains” may not mean a lot to a ninth grader trying to figure out their place in a new school on it’s own, but it does provide ample opportunity to create ideas of “chains” that impede upon a person’s freedom today. It was at this school, teaching this curriculum, that I started to see state, Federal, and school curricula as rules I had to learn how to bend or use as support to do what I believed would make the classroom a more interesting and engaging experience for both myself and my students.

This mindset that I had seemed to fit in well with Nel Noddings’ discussion of “aims” in Happiness and Education. Having so often been pressured by administration and school leaders to stress the importance of assessments I had no hand in making or enforcing rules that I had no role in creating, I regularly found myself questioning what the “aims of education” were and how those aims fit into what I thought about the role of education. Nel Noddings’, when talking about the 21st Century economic heavy educational aims, wrote “We should be troubled by the suggestion that economic equity is achieved by forcing the same curriculum on all children.” This quote struck me not only because I believe the idea of only focusing on economics and personal wealth accumulation degrades community investment and growth, but because I have spent too much time in schools that praised their “absence of tracking” while forcing all students (even special education students who couldn’t attend any traditional four year university) to take advanced math before they graduated from high school. Schools were so focused on what their school looked like on paper that the reality of the curriculum they created was more aligned to the needs of evaluators and the needs of students.

As I continue to learn more about curriculum both as a guide that is used by various authorities to judge “effectiveness” of a school, I’m also focused on learning about how to simultaneously hit those benchmarks while also trying to use and construct a curriculum that fits into my ideals of education as a way to prepare students for success in whatever path they choose to take after they leave school. I look at Noddings’ aim of educational justice that says “to provide all students with an education that will meet their needs,” and strive to think about how I can do this and make sure that myself and my school are also deemed “effective” enough to continue the job that we love. Ideally, at some point we’ll teach in a system that values differences, whether they be cultural, academic, or anything in between and outside of those, but until then, my goal is to learn as much as I can to be considered “effective” in an inequitable system while striving to adapt whatever curriculum I have at my disposal to prepare students to feel joy and success in their learning experiences both in school and beyond.