Constructing understanding

Windschitl, M. A. (2000). Constructing understanding. In Joseph et al. Cultures of curriculum.

Three themes of constructing understanding

• centrality of the learner
  compare new knowledge with their past knowledge; learners as capable agents of knowledge production
  
• complexity
  PBL; richer, more integrated view of the world; teacher incorporate student diversities into classroom
  
• engagement
  experiencing the content; projects; interacting with teachers and peers
  

The characteristics of this curriculum culture

• Encourages learners to utilize their lived experiences, intellectual strengths, and interactions with others to bridge the domains of formal knowledge with the rich, continually evolving world of the individual mind

Visions

• Constructivism: learners actively create and restructure knowledge, constantly comparing ideas introduced in formal instruction to their existing knowledge, which has been assembled from personal experiences, the intellectual, cultural, and social contexts in which these ideas occur, and a host of other influences that serve to mediate understanding
  
• Objectivism (in opposition to Constructivism): an external world independent of human consciousness. Language as a precise, neutral tool to describe the real world and effectively map knowledge from the minds of instructors to the minds of learners. These two beliefs supported transmission models of instruction (direct instruction, didacticism). E.g., behaviorism - knowledge and skills may be decomposed, the components removed from from context, acquired separately by learners through systematic reinforcement of incremental target learning behaviors, and then concatenated by the learner to form a coherent whole
• Sense of agency in learners related to Piaget's larger view of the purpose of education: to develop intellectual and even moral autonomy in learners
• Critical constructivism: questioning the value of individualism, objectivity, rationality and efficiency as well as the resulting forms of pedagogy and curriculum. It suggests that teachers should convey to learners that all knowledge is provisional and make explicit the political and social context of this knowledge.
• encourage learners to expand on the ideas of other - to explore the possibilities not only of how to solve authentic problems, but consider alternative ways of seeing what problems 'exist' in a given situation
• Lager vision: citizens collaborate effectively, understand and appreciate other's viewpoints, incorporate diverse ideas into problem solutions, negotiate with open mind, life-long learners, respect children's way of seeing the world
  

History

• John Dewey's progressive schools: lab school in Chicago, 1896, to 'test, verify, and criticize' educational theory as well as to contribute new ideas to education
  
  • the curriculum should spring from the "genuine" experiences of children
  • authentic problems should be identified within these experiences to serve as stimuli for thought
  • students should be allowed the freedom to gather the info necessary to deal with these problems
  • students should be given opportunities to test these ideas through application to make their meaning clear and test their validity (Dewey, 1916)
    
• Montessori schools (1967)
  
  • teachers as facilitators, architects of the environment, resource persons, supportive
    
  • Children as free pursuer of learning experiences, natural learners in a better position to make learning choices than their adult mentors
• Reggio Emilia schools (1946)
  
  • projects involving teachers, family, and community members
  • objective: to increase the possibilities for the child to invent and discover
  • children as capable of making meaning from daily life experiences through mental acts involving planning, coordination of ideas, and abstraction
    
• Piaget
  
  • learning as a way of constantly reorganizing one's world, reconciling new info with past experience
  • Knowledge is not an internalized representation of the real world but a collection of conceptual structures that are sensible only within the knowing subject's range of experience (foundational to cognitive constructivism)
  • Cognitive constructivism: the system of explanations for how learners, as individuals, impose structure on their worlds (a. meaning is rooted in and indexed by personal experiences; b. young learners possess complex but inaccurate conceptions of how the world works; c. these conceptions influence how they respond to formal instruction
• Two theories related to cognitive constructivism - social constructivism & sociocultural learning: knowledge is personally constructed and socially mediated (e.g., individuals construct knowledge in the presence of others who both constrain and enrich the environment through the use of tools such as language, conventions (such as pre-established concepts), and accepted practices for creating and judging knowledge (Vygotsy, 1979)

Learners and teachers

• Learners: continually involved in reorganizing their world, actively imposing order and meaning on their experiences and "creating" the world in which they live
• Teacher: a learning facilitator and a codeveloper of understanding with the student rather than a dispenser of knowledge
• Instruction styles: probing discussion, interviews, concept mapping, presentations, demonstrations, semi-structured activities
• Strategies
  
  • Scaffolding, in which teachers reduce the difficulty of learning tasks by helping students with more complex aspects of problems and gradually give more responsibility to learners as time passes
    
  • Modeling, in which teachers either think loud or act out how they would approach a problem
    
  • Providing hints to learners by asking probing questions or redirecting attention
    

Content and context

• Norms about content
  
  • The way in which learners approach the subject matter is as important as the topics themselves
  • The long, critical engagements with the subject matter favored in the constructivist culture suggest that less is more (understanding is fostered by prolonged engagements with a few key topics and encyclopedic coverage of content is avoided)
  • The organization of content lends itself to the integrated curriculum (e.g., studying the historical perspectives of art, the mathematics of geography, literature in science)
    
• Concerning the context of instruction, the focus is the learner rather than the subject matter
  
  • Situating examples, analogies within meaningful contexts
  • Not to provide exhaustive detail, "authoritative" explanations
  • Working in groups
  • Collecting evidence and generating interpretations consistent with such evidence (foster a "thinking about thinking" environment)
  • Long-term engagement with projects and problems (block scheduling, interdisciplinary curriculum, teacher teaming)
    
• Common characteristics in the design
  
  • Teachers find out "where students are" intellectually before instruction and then monitor how students gradually make sense of the subject matter
  • Teachers provide students with early investigative experiences relevant to the subject matter rather than start with explanations
  • Students are given frequent opportunities to engage in problem or inquiry-based activities
  • Such problems are meaningful to the student and not oversimplified or decontextualized
  • Students work collaboratively and are encouraged to engage in dialogue
  • Students have various avenues to express what they know to their peers and to the teacher
  • Teachers encourage students' reflective and autonomous thinking in conjunction with the conditions listed above
    

Planning and evaluation

• Teachers shape the curricular process, determine standards for the students' work, and create the structure of classroom activity
• Students have some latitude in choosing problems or designing projects that relate to curricular themes; negotiating with the teacher what the criteria are for selecting problems to study, and what kinds of evidence must be provided to demonstrate their learning
• Planning criteria
  
  • Is the chosen problem meaningful, important to the discipline and complex enough?
  • Does it deal with the theme of the unit under study?
  • Does it require original thinking and interpretation or is it simply fact-finding?
  • Can this problem help you think about related problems?
  • Will engaging with this problem result in the acquisition of contexualized facts, concepts, and principles that are fundamental to the theme under study?
    
• Evaluation (rigorous and multidimensional)
  
  • Based on the processes as well as the products of intellectual activity
  • Not absolutely preclude objective testing as one source of evidence of understanding (the exclusive use of objective testing provides only a limited pic of the scope of learner's knowledge)
  • Based primarily on student performances or artifacts generated as a result of substantial effort, judged against the agreed-upon criteria that the students jointly developed with the teacher
  • Students maintain portfolios that contain both typical and exemplary works
    

Dilemmas of practice

• The most difficult challenge in maintaining a culture of constructivism: the need for many teachers to reconceptualize their view of instruction
• The oversimplification of constructivism as opposed to traditional instruction
  
  • Reduced the instruction to "anything goes"
  • Effective forms should integrate both teacher-centered and student-centered models that have systematic and purposeful structure, and value rigorous evaluations of learning progress
    
• Heavy burden on teachers' side
  
  • teachers are responsible for the framework of instruction
  • requires teachers to have an almost unrealistic degree of subject matter knowledge and pedagogical skill including negotiating subject matter and evaluation criteria with students, maintaining a pro-social atmosphere in student groups, and coordinating the timetables of the various student projects; understand what a "problem" is, and cooperative learning theory
    
• Lack of control over students
• What exactly do we want students to construct?
• Ideas in the academic disciplines will differ in the extent to which they can be taught through constructivist instruction (e.g., math 3x2=6 both sense-making experiences and rote learning)
  

Critique

• Although constructivism can be viewed as a philosophy that provides guidelines for learning such as promoting student autonomy, collaboration, and sense making, it remains difficult to represent constructivism as a single, coherent set of pedagogical methods (it is little more than thematic, project-based learning)
• The goals of education, articulated in national, state and local standards, do not always seem compatible with the rich and diverse understandings of individual students
• Constructivism represents merely a set of guidelines for instruction and does not have import with regard to the larger issues of curriculum
  
  • no social vision is promoted
  • no concern for caring about others or for the environment, for combating oppression, or for making the world a better place
  • no incentives for learners to participate in the community or in the larger culture outside of school
  • pays little attention to how politics and privilege affect meaning-making by learners
  • The constructivist culture may be a means, but not an end (This culture aims to promote autonomous learners and create a society in which authority is never blindly followed and individuals' worldviews are not controlled by miseducative influences of peers and popular culture. Autonomy, however, does not automatically translate into community or a shared vision of a better society)
    

Critique

Comps outline for curriculum track

Recommended readings

* Kelly Chapter (in particular, The politics of knowledge)
* Parkay & Hass's social context article
* The last two chapters of New Literacies (Digital Epistemologies & New Ways of Knowing)
* The Oliva article (curriculum vs instruction)

Thomas Robert Malthus's Principle of Population: "The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world. "

Other readings:

Computers as Mindtools (Johnassen)
The Medium is the Massage (McLuhan)
Digital Immigrants vs Digital Natives (Prensky)

The additional comments from Dr. NJB:

1. The Glatthorn article on curriculum alignment, Curriculum Alignment Revisited , is a good article because it provides a clear process for planning and or improving the curriculum for any course or discipline area. It draws very much on constructivist principles. However, at the end Glatthorn suggests several other alignment possibilities and some of those would be more likely to be employed by other theoretical perspectives

2. Because you have an affinity for Glatthorn, who bases most of his work on constructivism, I'd suggest that you thoroughly familiarize yourself with the constructivist approach. No problem, as it is nicely summarized in Joseph's "Constructing Understanding" chapter. Keep in mind, however, that Joseph and her co-authors have basically done a lit review in this book. While it's fine to reference them a little bit, it's better to be able to talk about the scholars they have cited and, of course, any other constructivist scholarship (as I believe Jonassen's work is- the Computer as Mind Tool author that you've mentioned).

3. Of course, as a scholar you need to be able to approach any curriculum project from more than one orientation or "theoretical perspective" (more oft-used terms than "curriculum culture') While you should know some basics of the various perspectives, you don't need to know everything about all of them (e.g., Joseph's six or Kliebard's four), but you should be able to use at least a couple more (in addition to constructivism) to analyze curriculum plans/processes. By the way, as you may have noticed in our Curriculum Theory class, the names of Kliebard's strands are more commonly used than are Joseph's. (e.g., Apple is referred to as a Social Reconstructionist)

4. Remember - you don't have to show that you know everything there is to know about curriculum - just that you are familiar with major scholars in the field and that you can synthesize and apply the knowledge you have gained from your studies. For your curriculum question, it's is fine to synthesize knowledge from your foundations and technology tracks with your curriculum knowledge, as long as you don't do that to the extent that you neglect curriculum scholarship. (In fact some theorists are to be found in more than one track, like Michael Apple)

Dr. Brooks

New ways of knowing: Learning at the margins

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2003). New literacies: Changing knowledge and classroom learning. Buckingham, PA: Open University Press.

Chapter 8. New ways of knowing: Learning at the margins

This a case study of the Language Australia Yanga Headlands State High School project. Main concerns about research in pedagogical approach to using new technologies within classroom settings with disadvantaged learners

• Teachers' cultural identities and experiences are often very different from those of their students (digital insiders/natives vs digital outsiders/immigrants)
  
• Low levels of technical and cultural knowledge on the part of teachers often result in computer-mediated learning activities being ineffective, inefficiacious, or mystifying (e.g., how to get the machines to work)
  
• Teachers often make well-intentioned uses of student 'savvy' with new technologies to get around snags at the technical operation level (enlist native competence in the service of immigrant practices)
  

The new project (Networks of practice)

• Researchers: participant observers (documents, activities - qualitative); info resources
• Participants: 4 "problem" boys
• Time: 2 hrs/week over an 8-10 week period

Features of the learning process

• A logic of transcendence
  
  • Different from contemporary preformativity-oriented ed. systems (which focuses on learning outcomes)
  • Learning consequences vs learning outcomes: students learn beyond the checklist of learning outcomes (e.g., becoming a good citizen, worker, community person and family member)
    
• Purposefully decentered learning
  
  • Learning in network context vs subject-based fixed content approach
  • uncovering new ground vs covering predetermined ground
    

Learning consequences (Pedagogical contexts look backwards as well as forwards. They project learners into new areas of capability and understanding, while drawing on what they have previously experienced, learned and understood, p. 193)

• Technical capability
• Cultural knowledge
• Self-perception of learners (from "fans" to "stars"; "failures was not a fixed, permanent, and natural position but rather sth. that could be challenged, disrupted, and rejected)
  

Rethinking the economics of attention

• Well-established patterns of student behaviors and teacher practices in a closed school economy
  
• "Brat level": seeking and gaining attention by illegitimate means constitutes resistance to the tight controls of the school attention economy
• ICT - deregulated economy (calling for criteria and standard change)
• Attention economy outside school vs within school
• In this project, students started from deflective attention work to being receiving full attention of a teacher
• Persuasion as a powerful social instrument - negotiating people's places in social groups

End notes

• Status quo: under the powerful impetus of state guidelines, policies, and funding arrangements, literacy is defined in terms of state mandated standardized tests; proficiency statements and knowledge are defined in terms of the content of a national curriculum; school-business partnership concept
• Top line: formal education can be so much more, and make far better, more direct, and more enabling connections between what students learn now and what will do and be later
• Bottom line: teachers' acknowledgment of the kinds of things young people are doing and being outside school in order to make effective pedagogical connections to them in class, despite the complexities teachers face on a day-to-day basis
  

Digital epistemologies

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2003). New literacies: Changing knowledge and classroom learning. Buckingham, PA: Open University Press.

Chapter 7. 'Digital epistemologies": Rethinking knowledge for classroom learning

Epistemology - the nature of knowledge

• Definition: the study of the origins, presuppositions, nature, extent, and veracity (truth, reliability, validity) of knowledge (e.g., What kinds of things can we know? What kinds of things are most important to know? How can we come to know things? What kinds of knowledge are possible?)
• Knowledge that a curriculum contain
  
  • propositional ~: knowing that something is the case
    
  • procedural ~: knowing how to do something
    
  • explanatory ~: knowing why something is the case
• the digitization of aspects and experiences are challenging the conventional epistemology
  

Standard epistemology: "justified true belief"

• General concept/model: for A (a person, knower) to know that P (a proposition), A must believe that P, P must be true, A must be justified in believing that P.
• The primary object of learning: the content of subjects (what we need to know about the world in order to function effectively in it is discovered through (natural and social) scientific enquiry
• Knowledge has both its literatures (content) and its languages (disciplined procedures)
• Authentic practice: apprenticeship, guided participation, participatory appropriation (promote the development of knowers as well as to transmit knowledge
• Problem: knowing how (procedural) has been subordinated to the pursuit of content (propositional)
  

The challenge of "digitization": an overview

• Changes in "the world (objects, phenomena) to be known", resulting from the impact of digitization
  
  • Difference in "stuffness": atoms (the world of analogues) vs bits (the digital world)
  • Ontological changes: The reality and logic impacts: aesthetics, evaluation, quality, trueness; expanding beyond the limits (verbal - text/print - television - computer); "being digital" (Negroponte, 1995)
    
• Changes in conceptions of knowledge and processes of "coming to know", contingent upon deeper incursions of digitization into everyday practices
  
  • Knowledge change in the postmodern/postindustrial condition (Lyotard, 1984) - two key functions of knowledge (research and transmission of acquired learning) change under the diminishing of the modernity belief and the effects of new technologies
    
    • Availability of knowledge as an international commodity becomes the basis for national and commercial advantage within the emerging global economy
    • Computerized uses of knowledge become the basis for enhanced state security and international monitoring
    • Anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable into quantities of information will be abandoned
    • Knowledge is exteriorized with respect to the knower, and the status of the learner and the teacher is transformed into a commodity relationship of "supplier" and "user"
  • Attention has moved from aims, values, and ideals to a new focus on "means and techniques for obtaining (optimally) efficient outcomes" (Marshall, 1998): Performativity - "Is it saleable?" "Is it efficient?" instead of "Is it true?"; Create "truths" rather than to discern them (e.g., research that finds what their clients want to hear...The TV documentary "People's Republic of Capitalism")
  • Access to perfect information being equal, imagination carries the day: enactive projects bring visions into reality - cybercultures; e-commerce
    
• Changes in the constitution of "knowers", which reflect the impact of digitization
  
  • Example 1 - "fast capitalist" workplaces and Discourses, and areas of enquiry like cognitive science and social cognition: e.g., "distributed cognition", "collaborative practice", "networked intelligence", and "communities of practice"; knowledge assembly, customization (my example: wikipedia); knowledge (P) located within the individual (A) vs knowledge (P) as an attribute of an individual (A).
  • Example 2 - people being electronically wired together as networks by means of wearable computers
    
• Changes in the relative significance of, and balance among, different forms and modes of knowing, which are associated with the impact of digitization
  
  • Conventional epistemology has privileged propositional knowledge - abstraction and decontextualization of classrooms - prohibited a more equitable balance between propositional and procedural knowledge (knowing how)
  • four facets of rethinking epistemology in terms of the evolving digital age
    
    • The importance of understanding knowledge in relation to building, inhabiting, and negotiating virtual worlds (e.g., SecondLife)
      
    • Multi-modal truth (from print to multimedia; meaning arrives in spatial as well as in verbal expressions in Cyberspace)
      
    • Attention economy (endless originality; focus on imagination)
      
• Challenges facing conventional epistemology
  
  • The rhetorical and normative modes challenge the scientific-propositional mode (e.g., digital media displacing older forms of typed and printed word)
  • Justified true belief is disrupted by practices mediated by digital ICTs (e.g., distributed cognition - fast capitalism, networked technologies; knowledge is distributed rather than concentrated; individual knowledge vs collective knowledge)
  • More performance epistemology (of knowing as an ability to perform, e.g., telematics, informatics) than propositional knowledge (of what already exists): Knowing how to proceed in the absence of existing models and exemplars; gaining attention vs scientific knowledge; chaos vs stability; bricolage, collage, montage...
    
  • None of the 3 logical conditions of justified true belief (JTB) is necessary for information (Lankshear et al., 2000): Senders - receivers; knowledge produced to be sold or to be valorized in the postmodern condition (Lyotard) doesn't necessarily require that the conditions of JTB be met.
    

Implications for classroom curriculum and pedagogy

• Social practices beyond the school within digitally saturated milieu privileging modes of knowing that are
  
  • more performance- and procedure-oriented than propositional (thus the subject-based curriculum founded on texts and academic teachers as authority is in trouble)
    
  • more collaborative than individualistic (thus individuals shouldn't be assessed as the personal bearers of knowledge)
    
  • more concerned with making an impact on attention, imagination, curiosity, innovation than with fostering truth, engendering rational belief, or demonstrating their justifiability
    
• Multi- and cross-disciplinary expertise is developed in performance, not through absorbing content
  
• Consistent with the idea of
  
  • school as a knowledge producer and provider for communities
  • diver forms of activity-oriented learning
  • trying to approximate to the quality of learning and approaches to learning that is characteristic of e.g, online video games and the communities associated with them
    

References

Lankshear, C., Peters, M., & Knobel, M. (2000). Information, knowledge and learning: Some issues facing epistemology and education in a digital age. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 34 (1), 17-40.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Marshall, J. (1998). Performativity: Lyotard, Foucault and Austin. Paper presented to the American Educational Research Association's Annual Meeting, San Diego, 11-17 April.

Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Social forces: Present and future

Parkay, F. W., & Hass, G. (2005). Curriculum planning: A contemporary approach (7th Ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. (Chapter 2. Social forces: Present and future, pp. 45-58)
Keywords: social forces, developmental tasks, future planning

Ten contemporary social forces that influence the curriculum

• increasing ethnic and cultural diversity ("melting pot" - "salad bowl")
  
• the environment (pollution, overpopulation, depletion of the ozone layer, ecosystem in peril)
  
• changing values and morality (fluctuating moral standards, drug abuse, teen alcoholism, divorce rate)
  
• the family (spread out over a wide geographical area, not tied to the community; single-parent family, divorce rate, poverty, domestic violence)
  
• the microelectronics revolution (Information Age, computers are not merely tools - expanding capabilities and interactivity, virtual school, digital immigrants vs natives)
  
• the changing world of work (decentralization of work tasks, self-directed learning over a lifetime)
  
• equal rights (women and minority groups more vocal, SES, haves vs have-nots, digital divide, Theoretical Connection - Apple's Remembering Capital)
  
• crime and violence
• lack of purpose and meaning (the fast change of the world led people to feeling disconnected from the society, family, and themselves)
  
• global interdependence (interconnectedness, interdependence, mutual respect, cooperation

Three developmental tasks that effective curricula help learners accomplish (Social forces and the individual)

• Vocation
  People's identities are determined by their occupations (SES)
  
• Citizenship
  A democratic society requires citizens who are prepared to deal with the current issues of government
  
• self-fulfillment
  Each person faces the challenge of achieving self-fulfillment and self-development
  

Three levels of social forces that influence the curriculum

• National/international (equal rights, crime and violence, lack of purpose and meaning, changing world of work, global interdependence, ethnic and cultural diversity, changing values and morality, microelectronics revolution, environment, family)
  
• Local community (community values, students' backgrounds, family structure, class structure)
  
• School culture (traditions, assumptions, teacher's role with staff, learner's social status, school-community harmony or discord, teacher's role in school, beliefs, beliefs)
  

Concepts from the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, social psychology) that help curriculum planners understand the social forces that influence the curriculum

• Humanity (cultural universals)
  organizing element in curriculum planning; particularly needed as the nations become more interdependent and together address problems of pollution, energy and food shortages, and terrorism (go beyond national borders)
  
• Culture (identity)
  the way of life common to a group of people; it represents their way of looking at the world; consists of values, attitudes, and beliefs that influence their behavior.
  
• Enculturation/socialization (enculturating and socializing children)
  immerse in a culture or cultures and learn the partterns of behvior supported by the culture into which he or she was born (learning this first culture)
  
• Subculture (understanding the differences and similarities and be positive about the individual culture)
  a division of a cultural group consisting of persons who have certain characteristics in common while they share some of the major characteristics of the large culture
  
• Cultural pluralism (cultural inclusiveness)
  a variety of ethnic and generational lifestyles, each grounded in a complexity of values, linguistics variations, skin hues, and perhaps even cognitive world views. Each person of different identification is entitled to the respect, dignity, freedom, and citizen rights promised by law and tradition; each group's contribution to the richness of the entire society is validated
  

Futures planning

• Definition: the process of conceptualizing the future as a set of possibilties and then taking steps to create the future we want
• Management of changes is the effort to convert certain possibles into probables, in pursuit of agreed-on preferables
  
  • Probable - a science of futurism
    
  • Possible - an art of futurism
    
  • Preferable -a politics of futurism

Critierion questions related to social forces in curriculum

• individual differences among learners (family/home/community background, subculture)
  
  • What social or cultural factors contribute to individual differences among learners?
  • How can the curriculum provide for these differences
    
• the teaching of values (hidden curriculum)
  
  • What values are we teaching?
  • What values do we wish to teach?
    
• the development of self-understanding (cultural pluralism)
  
  • How can the school program assist learners in achieving their goals of self-understanding and self-realization?
    
• the development of problem-solving skills (clarify problems and develop problem-solving strategies)
  
  • Has the curriculum been planned and organized to assist learners in identifying and clarifying personal and social problems?
  • Does the curriculum help learners acquire the problem-solving skills they will need now and in the future?
  • Does the curriculum include the development of skills in futures planning?
    

Curriculum alignment revisited

Glatthorn, A. A. (Fall, 1999). Curriculum alignment revisited. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 15 (1), 26-34.

Misconception/narrowness
Under the accountability pressure, most teachers simply understand curriculum alignment as to "check the content of the state tests by using nonconfidential materials, examine the curriculum guide to remind themselves about what else should be taught, develop plans to accommodate the guide and the test, and teach as best as they can" (p. 26).

Used foolishly, curriculum alignment

• diminishes the art of teaching
• sterilizes the curriculum
• makes the classroom a boring place

Used wisely, curriculum alignment offers teachers a practical method to ensure that students are well prepared for the mandated test

Creative coping

• Analysis of the written curriculum
  
  • Mastery curriculum (essential for all; based on state standards and benchmarks; grade-specific; tested; should require only 60-80% of class time to teach)
    
  • Organic curriculum (essential for all; continuing development; not grade-specific; not tested)
    
  • Enrichment curriculum (not essential; "nice to know")
    
• Development of mastery units (tested-written-taught)
  
  • review the mastery benchmarks
  • develop written curriculum within the limits of prescribed state standards and tests
  • implement the unit flexibly, modifying it to respond to students' needs and abilities
  • teach a brief enrichment unit if time is available
    
  
  

Expansion of the concept of Alignment

• Eight types of curriculum
  
  • hidden: the unintended curriculum - what students learn from the school's culture and climate and related policies and practices. (powerful influence on students)
    
  • excluded (null): what has been left out.
    
  • recommended: the curriculum advocated by experts. (little impact on the written curriculum and teachers)
    
  • written: the document produced by the state education agency, the school system, the school, and/or the classroom teacher that specifies what is to be taught (moderate influence on the taught curriculum)
    
  • supported: the curriculum that appears in textbooks, software, and multimedia materials. (strong influence on the taught curriculum - e.g., elementary teachers who teach 4-5 subjects rely heavily on the textbook - major source of content knowledge)
    
  • tested: embodied in state tests, school system tests, and teacher-made tests. (strongest influence on teachers and students - "will this be on the test?")
    
  • taught: the curriculum that teachers actually deliver. (significant gap between the taught and the learned - student don't always learn what they are taught)
    
  • learned: the "bottom-line" curriculum - what students learn. It's the most important curriculum of all.
    
• Aligning the most important types of curriculums (best to be added to the written/taught/tested triad)
  
  • hidden/taught (uncover the hidden - find the discrepancy - modify)
    
  • written/recommended (compare the state standards and benchmarks with those recommended by the professional organizations to improve standards)
    
  • excluded/written (recapture the excluded content to add to the written)
    
  • supported/written (compare textbooks on state-approved list with the state-mandated course)
    
  • tested/learned (use the result of both the state's mandated tests and the teacher's tests to diagnose teaching/learning problems)
    
• Aligning the taught/learned curriculums
  
  • the taught/learned gap: student don't always learn what they are taugh
  • causes
    
    • environmental factors (e.g., classroom climate; external noise)
    • teacher factors (poor organization, unclear explanations, unclear speech, misinformation, insufficient monitoring and assessment, insufficient and/or inappropriate choice of content knowledge)
    • student factors (inattentiveness, lack of prior knowledge, disability, emotional problems, absorption with a personal agenda, influence of peers, disconnectedness with lesson content, fatigue or illness, cultural differences, preference for avoiding failure rather than being embarrassed by participating)
      
  • solutions: peer collaboration in diagnosing and remediating the problem.
    

Knowledge & the curriculum

Kelly, A. V. (2004). The curriculum theory and practice (5th Ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Chapter 2. Knowledge and the Curriculum

Major planning considerations - why analyze the status of human knowledge

• What is to be learned
• How that knowledge relates to other curriculum planning aspects (purposes, reasons)
  e.g., Tyler (1949): "What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes?"
• How we conceptualizing the curriculum (the failure to recognize the problematic nature of human knowledge)
• (Recognizing the problematic nature of human knowledge) in making decisions about the content of the curriculum we're dealing in ideologies rather than in eternal truths

The problematic nature of human knowledge

• Absolutism
  
  • two main theories: rationalist views (intellect over human faculties; truth achieved by the mind) vs empiricist views (truth based on evidence, senses)
  • Rationalist epistemology - the fallibility of the senses vs the infallibility of the intellect (Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel): evidence of senses is misleading; the rational mind can achieve truth); knowledge as essentially independent of the observations of our senses (God-given, 'out-there', timeless, objective, unrelated to societies, cultures or human beings);
  • Its attraction for the politicians: the universal above the particular; the collective above the individual
  • Its attraction for some educational theorists: epistemological belief, e.g., Richard Peter's "transcendental" argument (1966) for the intrinsic value of certain kinds of human activity
    
• Empiricism
  
  • John Locke, Founder of the empiricist movement: knowledge acquired through experience
  • John Dewey, promoting pragmatist movement: knowledge as hypothetical and subject to constant change, modification and evolution; assist children to develop their own knowledge instead of imposing what is knowledge for us upon them (knowledge is personal and subjective).
  • However, Dewey believed in scientific knowledge, where hypotheses are framed and modified according to publicly agreed criteria; Its continuing evolution requires the kind of intellectual freedom which only a truly democratic political context can provide
    
• Existentialism
  
  • a concern to resist the submerging of the individual into some kind of whole; every human being must be defined as a unique individual and accept full responsibility for his/her own 'essence', what he/she is and becomes.
• The 'knowledge explosion' of the twentieth century
  
  • A shift from verification to falsification (theories are regarded as having validity until they are shown to be false or inadequate)
  • Such a rejection of "modernism" may see the beginning of postmodernism
    
• 'New directions in the sociology of education'
  
  • The absolutist view of knowledge was challenged from two sources
    
    • At the level of curriculum practice, the unsuitability and the consequential alienating inequalities
    • At the level of educational practice (1970s), reconceptualization
  • Questions of the nature of are sociological rather than philosophical and are concerned with the social relations through which knowledge develops rather than aspects or characteristics of the knowledge itself
  • Most of school subjects are in fact the creations of interest groups whose prime concern has been with maintaining and extending their own status
  • Socially constructed knowledge is ideology and what is imposed through a politically controlled education system is the ideology of the dominant, controlling group
• The teaching of religion and the establishment of 'faith schools'
  
  • When education becomes religious knowledge/instruction, it loses its critical dimension and becomes the imposition of the religious values of those in control on the impressionable young people
  • Result: culturally divisive and elitist
  • The politics of knowledge
• Postmodernism
  
  • a rejection of all 'totalizing theories', an 'incredulity towards metanarratives', 'an interrogation of Western discourse's desire for certainty and absolutes', a complex, chaotic, finite vision of the universe
  • It places everything in a cauldron of uncertainty and insists that that is where everything must stay (with continuing scepticism)
  • Implications: curriculum planning and organization are consequently wide-ranging, the foundation should be elsewhere than knowledge-content, and knowledge is ideology so that all approaches to the school curriculum are ideological
  • it makes an explicit link between knowledge and power, and sees power as being exercised through the distribution of knowledge and the manipulation of the discourses through which that knowledge, those 'totalizing theories' are expressed, 'the bureaucratic imposition of official values'.
  • we live in a world in which there is no 'knowledge', no 'ultimate truth', in which all perception is subjective, so that we are the products of the discourse, the ideologies, we are exposed to (Kelly, 1995, p. 71).

The politics of knowledge (Knowledge debate has shifted from being a philosophical concern to a social construct and on to the political concerns)

• Totalitarianism - open and concealed
  
  • An absolutist epistemology leads to totalitarian forms of government (no individual freedom)
  • Plato (first advocate of the absolutist epistemology): ideal state is not a democracy, it is a meritocracy; not a society of equals, it is hierarchically structured with a selective education system that focuses on the needs of the state rather than on individuals; ultimate goal - social control and political harmony
  • Consequences of an absolutist epistemology: social and educational inequalities, elitism, the subservience of the individual to the collective, loss of individual freedom (proponents: Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx - 'the enemies of the open society'; Nazi, communist regimes)
  • It fails to recognize the problematic nature of human knowledge
• Resistance to change
  
  • John Dewey: reject Hegelian absolutism and embrace a pragmatist view of knowledge; evolution of knowledge requires the kind of free and open social and political context which only democracy can provide; democracy is a form of government open to continuous change
  • American schooling operates to reinforce certain basic aspects of the American political, economic and moral structure
  • Paulo Freire (1972): the pedagogy of the oppressed; Ivan Illich (1971): the institutionalization of values
• Ideological dominance (distribution of power and the principles of social control)
• It is a matter of one dominant group within society imposing its ideology on society as a whole and thus achieving political control at the expense of the freedom of others
• It is the group within society which holds power, the dominant ideology, which controls the distribution of knowledge within a society and determines what kinds of knowledge will be made available
• The legitimation of discourse
  
  • The use of sanctions: e.g., financial sanctions
  • Threatening school closures, the firing of teachers, and the public humiliation of schools
  • Testing of pupils in order to produce educationally meaningless 'league-tables'
  • Discourse is seen as power and the legitimation of discourse as the exercise of that power (Postmodernism claims that the totalizing theories and thus the discourses in which they are expressed are not 'eternal truth' but ideologies, then our thinking is being controlled by ideological discourse which is both intellectually and politically highly suspect)
  • The language of education has been manipulated to ensure that the language we use carries the values we are intended to embrace. Therefore, we need to analyze critically the language in which official pronouncements are made and the ways in which the language we are encouraged to use
    
• The manipulation of language
  
  • Blurring logical distinctions between assertions of different kinds
    
    • we are encouraged to regard what officialdom says out of political expediency as carrying more weight than the evidence of painstakingly research; the context of the teacher's work is political rather than educational, totalitarian rather than democratic
  • The deliberate failure to acknowledge the problematic nature of the concepts used in making these pronouncements
    
    • e.g., terms like standards, breath, balance, continuity, progression, are used in documents governing practice, with no discussion invited
      
  • Among the terms used we will find many which have clearly been selected because they have warm, happy, friendly connotations
    
    • analyzed concepts like entitlement, relevance, coherence, development hijacked from theories to be misused in order to mislead or deflect criticism
      
  • Use of metaphor (esp. commercial/industrial)
    
    • e.g. the imposition of the commercial and industrial metaphor on the education system - school as factories that delivers products and requires quality-control mechanisms, increased productivity, economic costing, clients, managers, targets...
    • The language of educational purpose has undergone a sea-shift of transformation into business terminology and the going discourse of the corporate culture
    • Values & attitudes: competition, productivity, instrumentalism, value for money; loss of caring, human development, intrinsic value, enrichment
      
  • This kind of censorship has become a form of self-censorship
    
    • the above metaphor and values have been completely absorbed by the teaching profession
    • Suffocated and brainwashed
    • If not critical reflection, education will be led by the nose by those whose agenda is the political or personal rather than educational
      

Responses to the problem of the politics of knowledge

• Ivan Illich: the only solution is to close the schools, to 'deschool' society
• Postmodernism suggests we accept the problematic nature of human knowledge and recognize the dangers of all totalizing theories but respond to this by embracing the need for openness and constant change
  
  • All knowledge is contextual, education is a process whose central concern is to assist the young to develop their knowledge within the public context
  • education must be open to, and accepting of, different world views and cultures without imposition of any one of these (public doesn't mean universal)
  • Awareness of the political manipulation is to be on the way to being armed against it; Empowerment of the individual