Idea Transcript
ournalof Crruum andSu/penion Winter 1991. Vd. 6, No. 2,167-177
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Perspectives and Imperatives CURRICULUM ANOMALY PAUL SHAKER, National-LouisUnittslty
Curriculum encompasses students' experience that is attributable to the school. It is present at school and away from school, wheneverthe events and encounters of school life influence students. It is an accumulation of the readings, talk, nonverbal communication, and physical environment of the school-whether intended or accidental-and whether student- or adkltinitiated. Curriculum is graffiti as well as textbooks, personality as well as pedagogy, and architecture as well as audiovisual aids. It is the tone of the morning announcements, the selection of magazines set out on the library racks, the color and condition of the school's walls, the after-school activities, the films, the standardized tests, the teachers' questions-the students' complete lives each day. The curriculum is as complex as life itself and as immune from control. In curriculum design, however, an intentional aspect to education is exercised. The assumptions traditionally governing our concept of curriculum are limited to the elements that we can control and manipulate through their empirical accessibility and their epistemological simplicity. In the spirit of an analytic reduction of experience, we can define curriculum according to what we can deal with positivistically rather than what curriculum is comprehensively. Thus, an instrumentalist fallacy has permeated curriculum work and shaped its definition and potential effectiveness. Critics have challenged and exposed the claims of control with analyses like the "hidden curriculum" and the "null curriculum," questioning the sincerity as well as the insight of curriculum designers.' In a more fundamental way, however, post-structuralist commentators on education have set'up an unrelenting attack on applying the positivist-empiricist paradigm to this social process field. After more than 15 years of sustained commentary, this transformational perspective has coalesced into a coherent alternative.
'On the hidden curriculum, see Philip W. Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Holt,
Rinehart &Winston, 1968). On the null curriculum, see Elliot W. Eisner and Elzabeth Vailance, ed., Conflicting Conceptions of Curriculum(Berkeley. McCutchan, 1974).
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What does this post-structuralist or naturalist perspective consist of for the curricularist? It surrenders notions of positive control--over the meaning of the curriculum or its composition. Control depends on a series of assumptions about knowledge and the learner that the naturalist cannot abide--the belief that we can fragment experience into discrete components, like objectives, without changing its meaning or oversimplifying its scope. Control further rejects the notion that we can evaluate even fragmented knowledge objectively and validly using unidimensional techniques like standardized tests. Control suggests, too, that a predictable student-product emerges from the process of schooling, but the record of education's effects suggests that students graduate with qualities and competencies that are largely unplanned for and often at odds with our planning. The product has continually defied control or prediction and may well be more affected by nonschool influences and unintended factors in the school than by the articulated curriculum of aims and objectives. This naturalist perspective does not obviate the need for curriculum work or deny the usefulness of the field. It does, however, redirect and refocus our efforts. Curriculum should interact fully with students' world. Instead of an austere isolation from everyday experience and popular culture, curriculum should provide a commentary and critique of it. The school experience should encourage students' theoretical understanding of their social, emotional, and intellectual encounters. We should conceive of curriculum as expansive and inclusive, widening its relevance beyond the school rather than seeking to introvertedly align it with the minutiae of micro-objectives derived from task analyses. Educators have allowed the curriculum to be coopted by one segment of society--the scientific managers-and have forfeited the transcendent and ancient function of education-creating a transformational awareness in learners. Education at its best fosters questioning and the creation of finer ideals. On the other hand, education should not, as it often does today, confuse itself with training and limit its aspirations to vocational preparation, a task better accomplished by internships and on-the-job training. Ironically, the ostensible subject matter of schools is utterly germane to students' lived experience, although the connections are infrequently made This omission is partly due to the misguided training function that permeates education and partly due to teachers' concepts of themselves As a by-product of the technologization of the field, teachers' professional status has diminished. In its lofty original conception, education is a mission to students' spirits, not an everyday or economic pursuit From students' viewpoint, the teacher remains a role model and societal exemplar--for better or worse-and society's most formal suggestion of what an adult should be. 2 Just at a moment Martha M. McCarthy, 'Legal Rights and Responsibilities of Public School Teachers," in Knowledge Basefor the Beginning Teacber, ed. Maynard C. Reynolds (New York Pergamon, 1989), pp. 255-268.
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when some allege this viewpoint is anachronistic, another instance emerges of a teacher criticized or released for his or her dress, life-style, or general unconventionality. Teachers, like the curriculum, have a hidden dimension, and this exemplifying aspect of their role may be more significant than any other Now, when we call on education to provide more benefits to society than ever before, the field is mired in a legacy of assumptions it misguidedly drew from physical science and technology. Today, as we call on education to liberate society from the banality of modem materialism, education finds itself a prisoner of the values of this worldview. The assumptions we hold about the scope and structure of the curriculum, the role of schooling and teachers, and the needs and aspirations of learners are, therefore, critical to our definition of the field. The curriculum is not a training ground for economic productivity. It has a more fundamental purpose, which if achieved, provides the motivation and rationale for people's economic productivity, as well as a source of meaning and inspiration for living in the world. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES Beyond the assumptions we hold about the definition of curriculum is the operational realm of aims and objectives, the common starting point of curriculum design. Because education is cleady purposive, few people object to enunciating broad aims for its pursuit. A straightforward example is this short list from Malaysia: (a) A common Malayan culture should be developed. (b) Equal opportunity should exist for free primary education. (c) Malay and English should become the media of instruction.) General aims (a) and (c) are curricular and necessarily guide school personnel at the broadest level. Problems begin to emerge when we extend the principle of stating purposes to the second and third level of specificity.4 Conventionally, this process includes making the objectives behavioral and moving to an instructional rate that exceeds one objective per hour of learning. Like the steps in an assembly-line process, the curriculum is subdivided and atomized. In theory, this approach implicitly ignores as much curriculum potential as it acknowledges and carries grand assumptions about the nature of knowledge and cognitive processes. In practice, the approach poorly characterizes the teaching act as it occurs or as it realistically could occur. The rich, interactive flow of teaching and the demands of the group setting dictate a reality removed 'Arieh Lewy, ed., Handbookof Curriculum Evaluation(New York: Lonrman, 1977), p 38. David iRKrathwohl, Benjamin S.Bloom, and Beram B.Masia, Taxonomy ofEducational
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Tbe Classificationof EducationalGoals, Handbook II AffeafweDomain (New York
David McKay, 1964).
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from the austere world of level-three behavioral objectives. The measures of behavioral performance and rates of successful achievement that are a part of the approach are commonly criticized as arbitrary and short on validity. The attempt to describe curriculum through specific objectives hangs on in writings about pedagogy despite cogent criticism and, more damningly, practicing teachers' broad rejection. As another manifestation of our scientific management legacy, documents based on this approach are copied or composed, compiled, filed, and ignored. They have become an inert manifestation of bureaucracy that helps schooling little and harms it a good deal by screening out a more salient understanding of classrooms and by occupying the time of professional staff fruitlessly. The main current of educational thought running from Socrates to Dewey includes the assertion of this broad aim. Education is not primarily for the purpose of acquiring knowledge but for learning how to learn. The behavioral objectives movement is a chronic throwback to sophistic attitudes about education and the curriculum that undervalue what the curriculum means to students and their need to make it personal. To recall a familiar metaphor, curriculum spirals outward from learners to their experiences of living It does not wind inward toward the preordained ideas of others in authority. INSTRUCTION The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) has been committed for several years to promulgating a knowledge base for teaching that "is expressed in articulated understanding, skills, and judgments which are professional in character and which distinguish more productive teachers from less productive ones." This knowledge is "not known by those who are simply well-educated people, who walk into the profession off the street" 5 In the press of trying to make teaching knowledge esoteric and clearly distinguishable from the realm of common sense, AACTE has strongly endorsed the rationalist paradigm of inquiry in education and has widely imposed the paradigm through the procedures of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Nonetheless, all professions are subject to claims by the uninformed that their special knowledge is, in fact, no more than common sense. Politics in a democracy, for example, is consciously put into the hands of untrained everymen. Educators, perhaps saddled with feelings of low social and economic standing, have reacted through entities like AACTE to a perceived lack of respect by expending great effort on producing a lore that is proof from
'Maynard C. Reynolds, ed., Knowledge Basefor the Begfnnfng Teacher (New York. Pergamon, 1989), p. ix.
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commonsense analysis. An esoteric knowledge b-e does not, however, best define professions based on social process endeavors. Law, politics, social work, as well as artistic fields such as architecture, journalism, and graphic design, are not so removed from every informed person's cultural experience that practitioners can insulate their language and methods from common discussion or understanding. Professionals' accomplishment in these fields is based on the quality of their performance and, when appropriate, their artifacts. The ability to perform their profession in the social system sets practitioners apart from others, not primarily their ability to discuss their field with intelligence and insight. In any event, we have little reason to believe that education's efforts to "scientize" itself have generated respect for the profession. Certainly, education has not generated the recognition that improved teaching practice would accomplish. But we have created a large industry of professional educators communicating with each other in a circle largely closed to the world of practicing teachers. Evidence of this journey to irrelevance is the separate track that the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) has taken from other higher education counterparts. Oriented toward public school educators' inservice needs, ASCD propagates a largely distinct literature of school reform, increasingly separate from the realm of AACTE and the American Educational Research Association (AERA), where teachers and supervisors rarely tread. In the interest of better understanding instruction as a component of curriculum, let us look at how the sanctioned NCATE approach treats the topic and how we might otherwise view it. In Reynold's Knowledge Base for the Beginning Teacher,the chapter dedicated to summarizing what the beginning teacher needs to know about "classroom instruction" revolves around four organizing ideas expressed in state-of-the-art jargon to ensure their scientific respectability: 1. Lessons in which learners perceive links among main ideas are more likely to contribute to content learning than are lessons in which links among main ideas are less easily perceived by learners. One way that teachers can facilitate students' perceptions of links among main ideas is through well-organized lessons and presentations. 6 How does this organizing idea remove teaching from the realm of pedestrian pursuits accessible through commonsense analysis? Who would propose poorly organized lessons with main ideas not related to one another' Literature, art, and music in our era, however, all employ deliberately discontinuous streams of ideas to stimulate interest, provoke intuition, or point to the irrational aspects of experience. We are left somewhere between oversimpli-
61bid., p. 102.
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fication and being simply misled by a principle such as this. We may be troubled, too, by the metaphor of 'links among main ideas." The image raises as many questions as it answers. Are the links emanating from the learnerr Or from expert opinion or disciplinary structure? Are some links correct and others incorrect Is it sometimes just as valuable to see main ideas as unlinked, as in different geometries or various theories on the movement of light? Alternately, we might claim in this area of methodology that teachers should reveal the schemes they use for understanding content and prod students to explore their own means. At some point, the teacher should make the rationale for a lesson explicit to students so they can understand the curriculum designer's approach to structuring experience and so better discover their own. 2. Teacher-student interactions about academic content are also an important means through which students come to perceive links among ideas (and thus to construct knowledge). In particular, teacher-student dialogue that involves 'scaffolding" and eventually 'fading" by the teacher appears to be associated with academic goals of knowledge construction and self-regulation.7 Again, a wealth of cited studies seems to bring us to recognize something that hardly seems worth stating-students learn from interacting with their teachers, and they learn more about the curriculum if the interactions are about the curriculum. Reynolds then claims that conventional school practice includes too much time off task and poorly executed lessons. We might all concur with his point, but this information comes from the qualitative evaluation of practice that a sensitive observer would report. It has few hallmarks of positivist experimentation. Reynolds makes much of the knowledge base for scaffolding, largely the notion that puzzled students should have the benefit of simply phrased or rephrased questions or problems Apparently, we are still mired in the world of common sense: How else can we explain a puzzling task to someone? As a more direct way of expressing this methodological assertion, why not claim that we teach what the phenomenal record of our classroom demonstrates that we have attended to, whether purposively or by chance, and our students benefit from various explanations and our persistence. 3. Teachers facilitate learning by engaging students in active cognitive processing about academic content through academic tasks. The teacher's selection andspresentation of tasks will determine the quality of cognitive processing by students We can translate Reynolds's point. Teachers teach students best by having them act on the curriculum. Curriculum and instruction dictate the level of
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Ibid.,p. 105. Cobi., p. 107.
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abstraction of student thinking. Although some methods, like Lozanov's in foreign language instruction, do not emphasize students' active engagement, how would students learn if they were not attending to the lesson. Is "active cognitive processing" something different from 'paying attention" or 'thinking"? The second sentence, which suggests that an involuntary effect takes place if teaching is well done, is more troublesome. The effect is learning and is exclusively under the teacher's control and influence. This view is the ancient empty-vessel metaphor for teaching in an unqualified form. What about the home's influence on students and their own independent states of mind? The latter statement is a completely frank expression of the positivist-behaviorist point of view: Learners are fully manipulable entities, controlled by their environment in ways simple enough to be identified and manipulated in a school setting. They are rats in a maze, pigeons playing the piano. This portrayal is the most succinct possible of the rationalist vision of the school. Set up the correct environment, and students will think in the prescribed ways. Reflection suggests that we are hardly so certain of how we wish to control students or that we wish to control students in this way. Even totalitarian states have fallen short of this ideal practice. Could we say instead about methodology that active, engaged students benefit most from the curriculum and that teachers should call students' attention to the levels of interpretation inherent in any text? 4. Teachers' decisions about classroom structure and organization have implications for students' beliefs about themselves and about school tasks.9 The entire environment for learning influences the experience of learning. We can deduce this point from our encounters with the visual and applied arts, as well as from our study of psychology. What else explains a human history of decorating, furniture making, sports and games, or fine arts More difficult are assertions about whether we can prove in exact ways the limits or magnitude of these effects. Criticism has never reached that stage in other aesthetic endeavors, and so professionals in those fields practice without such expectations or claims. The same committed but diffuse attitude continues to guide the best practice in education. SELECTION AND SCOPE The metaphorical term curriculum comes from the concept of a racecourse, like that of the Circus Maximus, where a competition is run. In practice, curriculum has come to mean a formal, sequenced structure of material for study that is a route to enculturation. There are other types of racecourses, however, and this central metaphor may function more fruitfully if applied
9lbid, p. 110.
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differently. A marathon, for example, is a race run outside a stadium, through the highways of the country or the streets of a town. Its scale is too large for a building to contain it without demanding an intolerable amount of repetitiveness. Curriculum is more a race of this character-beginning and ending formally at the school-stadium and attending to the structures of the educatorrulemakers. The student-runners do not pass through the controlled environment of the sports arena, however. The panorama includes the vistas of their lived experience, and the school-race is but one part. Student-runners are affected by rain or heat, although the teacher-referees cannot predict or control these factors. They are distracted by events in the towns they pass through and may even quit the competition if these peripheral phenomena dominate their interests. At best, the athlete-scholars can run and observe and meet the standards of the sport while being conscious of the people and sights of the course they pass over. By attempting to run a marathon inside a closed arena, we have forced many competitors to ignore their repetitive surroundings by withdrawing their attention from the racecourse environment. Some in desperation quit the race, stultified. Others grow frustrated with the confining oval they circle, yearning for the open expanse and changing terrain that challenged the first marathoner, an Athenian soldier, whose purpose was life and death, not sports or games. A closer replication of the lived experience in the curriculum would bring the education game more into congruency with its original intentpreparation for life-and imbue schooling with clearer purpose and meaning. To naturalize the curriculum-to take it outdoors-we need to include students' world of perception and society's panoply of occurrences. Students, for example, watch about 50 hours of television each week, but school finds little occasion to sharpen students' critical or observational faculties for this dominant medium. In America, television may be the most widely shared cultural experience, and its influence, unchallenged, may act to undo education's higher goals before they are fully introduced to learners. The formalist racecourse curriculum cannot adapt to this interference. It can neither incorporate and exploit student interest and familiarity with the medium nor can it turn student attention away from it. Reading gives way to viewing as the definitional means of obtaining information, and educators neither adapt to the change nor confront it. Like a sporting event from which the public's attention has strayed, the curriculum becomes anachronistic and marginal. Many of the best participants and their best energy go elsewhere. The curriculum has importance if it enables learners to respond to their phenomenal world actively and insightfully, to discern quality in human performance, and to sense a purpose in their being that transcends the materialism society commonly proffers. Recalling our marathon metaphor, the student-runners are competing ultimately for "personal bests," for this race has no one winner. They are well advised to strive to attain the high standards they have set for themselves. In
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a marathon, some set their goals in accord with age or gender, others race in wheelchairs. The racecourse is individually perceived and employed Great benefit may fall to those whose time is long as well as to those whose time is short. Jung's analytic psychology gives self-realization as the source of motivation for people, and it serves well as a theme for education. In our particularistic ways, we look for wholeness in life--an ability to experience the social, natural, and introspective realms with the subtlety and adaptabilitythey require. We construct a destiny for ourselves--some call it a myth-and consciously or unconsciously we seek to fulfill it. Students look more energetically to their popular culture heroes today than to the historical figures of the curriculum for guidance in their quest. Youthful and inexperienced, unequipped by education to recognize or conduct their journey, students frequently turn their fervor to frustration and antisocial acts. Crime, violence, and alcohol and other drug abuse are the products of their lost rage. They have abandoned the patterned arena of school and, instead, are wandering the marathon racecourse that could have been their pathway to understanding had we made it so.
RECAPITULATION As we reflect on the direction of education in this century and think of how the field might have developed, a pervasive theme is the dominance of a cult of efficiency, of scientific management values over the student-centered progressivism of Dewey and others. The evolution of curriculum theory and practice dearly illustrates this struggle over values. Dewey expresses noble aims for education that influence and parallel what we find in national statements of purpose, but we cannot imagine him trying to subdivide these goals into behavioral objectives that would govern each teacher'sday. Instead, we expect the pragmatist to project that we would achieve these overarching purposes because problem-centered activity spontaneously flows from a properly conceived curriculum. This curriculum replicates life outside the school and attends to student interest. In responding to it, students address society's concerns because these concerns have effectively become their concerns. The fragmentation and indirection of the scientific management approach are so complete today that teachers as well as students lose sight of the aims intended to guide them all. From the pieces of curriculum that constitute daily lessons, few if any participants can reconstruct the original grand design. Dewey cites "active occupations" as the vehicle for creating and sustaining a holistic, integrated view of the curriculum. He has continually called for an organization of schooling that emanates from students' phenomenological world, not from the structure of the disciplines.
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The progressives never imagined that any but active learners could succeed as students. Activity in learning has never fit, however, into the administrative needs for order and quiet that have dominated life in schools. Nor does segmenting the day into short periods give active learning a stage on which to function. The assembly-line metaphor, so pervasive in scientific management thinking, translates poorly to schools. Workers' motivation is concrete-eamrning their livelihood; students' motivation is remote and abstract-preparing for life. Production must govern the factory, but interest, a deep human characteristic, should govern the school. Workers have limited need for seeing the overall picture of production; their motivation is extrinsic. For students, however, the fundamental purpose of education is to envision who they are to become, who they wish to become. Perhaps most ironic is the movement in America away from many scientific management principles in industry itself as productivity has declined in the face of worker dissatisfaction. Humanized theories fromJapan and Scandinavia have become commonplace in contemporary management. Emulating the models of other fields by definition has put educators a step behind. When Dewey visited China, he was received with great enthusiasm because his ideas about the relatedness of action and learning were rooted, too, in Confucian thought The two philosophers, ancient and modem, view motivation in related, but not identical, ways. Dewey places student interest at the center of the educational enterprise and uses it as a governing principle in designing curriculum. Student interest was to be the source of energetic attention and involvement by students with their schooling. The sources of interest are rooted in human nature, and traits common to all primates, like curiosity, and traits uniquely human, like the development of an autonomous personality or self, parallel the sources of interest.' 0 Confucius proposes that this energetic engagement comes from students' sheer diligence. Today, the Chinese culture associates hard work with the achievement of success in education as in other pursuits. To redress insufficient learning, learners simply apply themselves harder. The will to persevere originates in obligation to the family in the Confucian model, not in individual or biological traits. Lest anyone too quickly dismiss this scheme as quaint and uninformed in view of modem learning theories, consider the positivists' own yardstick, the results of standardized tests. The Scholastic Aptitude Test in America, for example, shows Oriental students outperforming the majority Caucasian population while other minorities lag behind. Family values and diligence seem to be the key.
'°Robert E. Proctor, Educations Great Amnesia (Bloomington. Indiana University Press, 1988).
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After explorations that have included many metaphors as heuristic devices in the quest to understand education and its subfields-and aware of the limitations of these metaphors-let me propose a final one in closing. This last parallel is in fact the first in historical terms because it is the profession education came from. Literacy and the conveyance of formal culture in traditional societies was once the province of priests. The ancient goal of education was to acquire knowledge of Scripture, and schooling occurred at the place of worship. Religion and education remain intertwined in many modern nation-states. Yet the teacher as priest or minister is a metaphor little explored in modern educational thought, and to many in this age of secular nation-states and materialist ideologies, the idea may seem anachronistic. Many comparisons, however unfashionable, remain. Ministers foster the faithful's consideration of a collected body of wisdom, fully recognizing the particular needs and orientations of their flocks. At their best, ministers promote reflection, insight, and personality development. They perform a communicative art as well as a service profession. Who, on the other hand, would scientize their occupation? Can we imagine the ministry being structured around behavioral objectives or standardized, objective evaluations. Is the profession given credibility and respect by the esoteric studies of seminary theologians or by the services of practitioners that those they minister to feel i daily? To some, these questions demonstrate why the metaphor fails. There is an absurdity to applying contemporary educational technique to understanding the ministry. Perhaps, however, the alternative analysis is more telling. Perhaps the metaphor is promising and more revealing than the wealth of others we can pose. What is absurd is that we have allowed education to become defined in such a way that this comparison seems impossible when a look at the goals of education suggests we are still related more closely to our forbears, the priests of the temple, than to any other occupation. If we help young people to construct a rationale for their being and ways of realizing that personal meaning, the force of human intellect and personality become engaged in the pursuit of learning, and the petty problems of technique fall away. If education does not effectively provide the content and inspiration, no appeal to method or design can give it significance. Preaching and teaching may be separated from each other, one sacred and the other secular, but we should not alienate them from their common origin or purpose. They are not as different as art and science, though some would wish it so.
PAUL SHAKER isDean, National College of Education, National-Louis University, 2840 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL60201-1796.
Copyright © 1991 by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. All rights reserved.