A Reflection on the Nature and Purpose of Curriculum Design
Foreword
I teach science because it is our first and best lens through which to view the world. Science is special; every child is fluent in it from the minute they arrive. We are confronted daily by natural phenomena, ruled over by the laws and coincidences that govern our universe. We are preprogrammed to explore the laws of the universe and draw conclusions from our experience. Children become experts in scientific skills without even trying: using mathematics to crawl and slide, using language to communicate, testing ground to see if it is steady, finding patterns in water, in stars, in sound. Science, a methodical analysis circling forever inwards toward predictable processes, allows us to engage with our observations, foresee the future, and intuitively solve problems. I would rather share the beauty and complexity of our natural world with students, would rather empower them to use their curiosity to expand human understanding, expertise, compassion, and dynamism, than anything else in the world.
Introduction: Curriculum by Choice
Designing curriculum is something I deeply enjoy. I like to create castles and corridors for my students to explore, to lead them through stories of history and controversy and coincidence and testing to a book they, too can write in. I want to lead them down brambly trails that peter out and disappear, to tell them, “this is all we know right now”, to encourage them to explore further. I love sharing my own enthusiasm and quick-witted engagement with puzzles and ingenious, elegant solutions to messy problems. I love reading a new book and translating it into a unit. In the long run, though, I’m most interested in finding the best, most hands-off way to support teenagers learning independently and at their own pace.
I believe very strongly that education should be consensual, rather than coercive. I believe this inherently, so I’m lucky that studies consistently agree that authentic learning is more long-lasting, and more beneficial than artifice. I was lucky enough to spend most of my life in educational settings that allowed me to choose my own course, to seek out my own resources, and experiment on my own. Ultimately, that freedom is what I want my students to experience. While I’ve never taught at a school that creates curriculum this way, I was able to spend some time at a free-choice school in Massachusetts. I asked students if they felt like they were supported enough, challenged enough, or if they were bored. I asked teachers and parents if they felt uneasy about the education their students were receiving. The response was overwhelming: this was the single best educational opportunity student or parent could have imagined. Visiting this fully democratic residential K-12 school, built on the same philosophy that I espouse, reinforced my beliefs that unenforced, non-coercive education is the best, most humane way to teach. I want to specialize in extremely responsive, dynamic, layered, individualized curriculum.
Educational Paradigms
I am energized by the diversity of curricular design I have been able to observe and practice this semester. I’m encouraged by our study of different pedagogies, especially examples of democratic classrooms and schools. My curricular philosophy is one which invites students in, gives them a wealth of choice and many avenues to pursue their interests, expand their skillsets, and challenge their opinions. I achieve this by approaching science from a concepts-based, big-picture perspective. My curriculum focuses on leading students to grasp large, overarching tenets of organization, evolution, interconnectedness, energy flow, and disturbance, which they then apply on both the micro- and macro scale. My curriculum also focuses on routinizing the scientific method, allowing students to practice creating and revising research questions and goals, carrying out independent, rigorous investigation, and reviewing and analyzing published science.
I would like to say that comparing different educational paradigms helped me to clarify where I stand in the current pedagogical landscape, but mostly it’s just served to underline that like academicians, educators may become preoccupied with defining boundaries and limits, compartmentalizing ideas into categories that are better understood holistically. Am I an authentic teacher or a post-modernist teacher? I’m neither. I’m both. I can see how forming distinct, sets of philosophies can clarify stances from which certain schools of education thought operate, but I’m glad that we focused on how to incorporate and meld, rather than separate, different educational paradigms. I’m content with having still not found any named philosophy that represents the sum total of my perspective and experience. I have struggled with the parts of this program that tap into the academic analysis of teaching. I was turned off by the politics and egomania of academia, and have, in the practice of teaching, been successful at finding different ways of talking about, analyzing, and celebrating conflicting perspectives and ideas.
It’s important to me that my curriculum be authentic. Real learning rarely happens when a learner doesn’t want it to, so the possibilities left for me to take advantage of as an instructor are: tricking/coercing a student into caring about their work or… allowing their learning to self-define and independently evolve. I most strongly adhere to the authentic model of learning, though I see how other pedagogies dovetail naturally to student-centered approach (eg democratic decision-making and coherent curricular flow). I don’t think anyone ever made the argument that any of these considerations are mutually exclusive, but it’s easier for me to imagine their combination than their separation. Rooting both format and content of curriculum in the phenology of the natural world, in the actions of a school or community, and in the personal choices and skills of a student body helps to limit the disjunction of life from learning. The most compelling questions and problems are those we can address in our own lives. By giving my students opportunities not just to see, but explore and mess about with the processes and organisms in their midst, we build in authentic learning opportunities as a class.
In teaching, I’m committed to providing excellent scientific literacy to my students. The materials we use, the readings we turn to, are primary literature rather than based in textbooks. We practice reading, parsing, and critiquing both scientific papers and the process by which studies are published. In every unit, we dive into the question of who has created our scientific knowledge, and how. We build bridges necessary to allow young adults to read and asses both scientific and pop-science literature, to follow and create citations. In a world where science is both increasingly maligned and mimicked by pretenders, post-modernist scientific literacy skills have never been more important in a discerning science classroom.
Curricular Philosophy
Writing this curriculum, talking about it with classmates, has, at times, made me think very deeply about whether the expectations and desires I have in design are what most students need or want. I have teaching experience, and there’s no doubt that that experience with students and classes informs the way I plan lessons, but most of my educational philosophy is rooted in my own experience as a learner. I know what I wanted out of school, my teachers, my community, and it comes down to being trusted and supported, instead of diverted from, pursuing my own questions. I am and have been most comfortable in an environment where resources, technology, experts, laboratories, data, and fellow investigators were available to me. I prefer what many would call dramatically unstructured learning.
I have been emboldened in this preference, over the years, by many writers and educational philosophers who seem to share my view that unstructured learning is the most authentic, the most democratic, and the most constructivist. Over the course of this year, and this semester, I’ve been faced with the reality that this radical approach is unrealistic not because of the strictures of the system that we’ve built to approach education, but because most people actually want a less radical approach… which, I guess, is why it’s been called radical all along. I tend to hear two kinds of feedback on my heuristic learning model: one, which shallowly agree with my craziness just because it is iconoclastic and different, and the other which dismisses it out of hand for breaking the rules of a system they’re entrenched with. I treasure those people, and those institutions that are able to give me nuanced feedback that will help me to refine and shape my curricular ideas into something more flexible and applicable to today’s educational landscape.
Of course I understand that every person, and every learner, has unique needs and doesn’t thrive in the same atmosphere. Some students will do better, and feel more secure in a highly-structured classroom. I can relate to this— I, by all accounts, succeeded academically in traditional educational systems. I practiced, I learned, I studied, I produced work on time, and I built connections that have helped me in my career. My negative relationship with institutionalized school comes from the way I felt dismissed, untrusted, and emotionally unsupported by most, though not all, school faculty and staff. It’s that atmosphere of mistrust and inhumanity that I most want to change about school. I think that has extreme relevance to curriculum design because the way we shape our units is also the way we presume to shape our student’s learning. I want create curriculum that precludes dehumanization of students.
Layered Curriculum
So my challenge has become: how do I design a curriculum for humanization? What formula can I use to allow students the correct level of choice, freedom, structure and support from within a system that is inherently teacher- and school-focused? This curriculum should: 1) never penalize students for taking their own path, for being disinterested in any particular subject matter, 2) produce students with distinct specializations 3) emphasize big-picture concepts, rather than basic discrete facts, as the common content basis. 4) encourage students to constantly interrogate their own understanding 5) challenge learners to break new ground, and develop new skills, for themselves 6) develop community adherence, interdependency, and know-how, 7) continually illustrate the precedence of all participants’s personal freedoms, rights, and sovereignty.
I’ve had a great time designing my bioenergetics curriculum, and it’s mostly convinced me that if and when I end up teaching at some kind of school that believes in grades and single-discipline teaching and whole-class curricula and coercive or standards-based topic-planning and other expectations I don’t really believe in, that I can still make a curriculum I’m proud to stand behind. Mostly, though, the project has opened up a lot of doors for me to walk through later. What does a classroom made entirely from student-created layered curriculum look like? How can I make a science lesson plan explicitly interdisciplinary? How can I facilitate whole-class democratic decision-making and topic choice? What different locations can I reasonably utilize to plant my students in a real-world setting? I’m confident that I can fake it as a teacher.
I’m specifically excited about turning my classroom into a layered-curriculum laboratory. For years, my ideal vision of a school, of a class, is to give students access to a number of resources - libraries, technology, farms, community centers, parks, study sites, laboratories, art galleries- and to encourage them to create coherent lines of inquiry and creation. Because I don’t think people really learn anything they’re not interested in, I need to give students the power and skills to nurture and fulfill their interests. The worst way that a student could feel coming out of a unit in my classroom is burned out. If my students can seamlessly transition between the joys and challenges of their lives and the topics they’re exploring in my curriculum— if the lessons and skills they’re developing “in class” blur with those they’re acquiring and using outside of school, if students know that they are respected as human beings, and understand they are being held to high expectations— I’ll feel like my work is done.
Foreword
I teach science because it is our first and best lens through which to view the world. Science is special; every child is fluent in it from the minute they arrive. We are confronted daily by natural phenomena, ruled over by the laws and coincidences that govern our universe. We are preprogrammed to explore the laws of the universe and draw conclusions from our experience. Children become experts in scientific skills without even trying: using mathematics to crawl and slide, using language to communicate, testing ground to see if it is steady, finding patterns in water, in stars, in sound. Science, a methodical analysis circling forever inwards toward predictable processes, allows us to engage with our observations, foresee the future, and intuitively solve problems. I would rather share the beauty and complexity of our natural world with students, would rather empower them to use their curiosity to expand human understanding, expertise, compassion, and dynamism, than anything else in the world.
Introduction: Curriculum by Choice
Designing curriculum is something I deeply enjoy. I like to create castles and corridors for my students to explore, to lead them through stories of history and controversy and coincidence and testing to a book they, too can write in. I want to lead them down brambly trails that peter out and disappear, to tell them, “this is all we know right now”, to encourage them to explore further. I love sharing my own enthusiasm and quick-witted engagement with puzzles and ingenious, elegant solutions to messy problems. I love reading a new book and translating it into a unit. In the long run, though, I’m most interested in finding the best, most hands-off way to support teenagers learning independently and at their own pace.
I believe very strongly that education should be consensual, rather than coercive. I believe this inherently, so I’m lucky that studies consistently agree that authentic learning is more long-lasting, and more beneficial than artifice. I was lucky enough to spend most of my life in educational settings that allowed me to choose my own course, to seek out my own resources, and experiment on my own. Ultimately, that freedom is what I want my students to experience. While I’ve never taught at a school that creates curriculum this way, I was able to spend some time at a free-choice school in Massachusetts. I asked students if they felt like they were supported enough, challenged enough, or if they were bored. I asked teachers and parents if they felt uneasy about the education their students were receiving. The response was overwhelming: this was the single best educational opportunity student or parent could have imagined. Visiting this fully democratic residential K-12 school, built on the same philosophy that I espouse, reinforced my beliefs that unenforced, non-coercive education is the best, most humane way to teach. I want to specialize in extremely responsive, dynamic, layered, individualized curriculum.
Educational Paradigms
I am energized by the diversity of curricular design I have been able to observe and practice this semester. I’m encouraged by our study of different pedagogies, especially examples of democratic classrooms and schools. My curricular philosophy is one which invites students in, gives them a wealth of choice and many avenues to pursue their interests, expand their skillsets, and challenge their opinions. I achieve this by approaching science from a concepts-based, big-picture perspective. My curriculum focuses on leading students to grasp large, overarching tenets of organization, evolution, interconnectedness, energy flow, and disturbance, which they then apply on both the micro- and macro scale. My curriculum also focuses on routinizing the scientific method, allowing students to practice creating and revising research questions and goals, carrying out independent, rigorous investigation, and reviewing and analyzing published science.
I would like to say that comparing different educational paradigms helped me to clarify where I stand in the current pedagogical landscape, but mostly it’s just served to underline that like academicians, educators may become preoccupied with defining boundaries and limits, compartmentalizing ideas into categories that are better understood holistically. Am I an authentic teacher or a post-modernist teacher? I’m neither. I’m both. I can see how forming distinct, sets of philosophies can clarify stances from which certain schools of education thought operate, but I’m glad that we focused on how to incorporate and meld, rather than separate, different educational paradigms. I’m content with having still not found any named philosophy that represents the sum total of my perspective and experience. I have struggled with the parts of this program that tap into the academic analysis of teaching. I was turned off by the politics and egomania of academia, and have, in the practice of teaching, been successful at finding different ways of talking about, analyzing, and celebrating conflicting perspectives and ideas.
It’s important to me that my curriculum be authentic. Real learning rarely happens when a learner doesn’t want it to, so the possibilities left for me to take advantage of as an instructor are: tricking/coercing a student into caring about their work or… allowing their learning to self-define and independently evolve. I most strongly adhere to the authentic model of learning, though I see how other pedagogies dovetail naturally to student-centered approach (eg democratic decision-making and coherent curricular flow). I don’t think anyone ever made the argument that any of these considerations are mutually exclusive, but it’s easier for me to imagine their combination than their separation. Rooting both format and content of curriculum in the phenology of the natural world, in the actions of a school or community, and in the personal choices and skills of a student body helps to limit the disjunction of life from learning. The most compelling questions and problems are those we can address in our own lives. By giving my students opportunities not just to see, but explore and mess about with the processes and organisms in their midst, we build in authentic learning opportunities as a class.
In teaching, I’m committed to providing excellent scientific literacy to my students. The materials we use, the readings we turn to, are primary literature rather than based in textbooks. We practice reading, parsing, and critiquing both scientific papers and the process by which studies are published. In every unit, we dive into the question of who has created our scientific knowledge, and how. We build bridges necessary to allow young adults to read and asses both scientific and pop-science literature, to follow and create citations. In a world where science is both increasingly maligned and mimicked by pretenders, post-modernist scientific literacy skills have never been more important in a discerning science classroom.
Curricular Philosophy
Writing this curriculum, talking about it with classmates, has, at times, made me think very deeply about whether the expectations and desires I have in design are what most students need or want. I have teaching experience, and there’s no doubt that that experience with students and classes informs the way I plan lessons, but most of my educational philosophy is rooted in my own experience as a learner. I know what I wanted out of school, my teachers, my community, and it comes down to being trusted and supported, instead of diverted from, pursuing my own questions. I am and have been most comfortable in an environment where resources, technology, experts, laboratories, data, and fellow investigators were available to me. I prefer what many would call dramatically unstructured learning.
I have been emboldened in this preference, over the years, by many writers and educational philosophers who seem to share my view that unstructured learning is the most authentic, the most democratic, and the most constructivist. Over the course of this year, and this semester, I’ve been faced with the reality that this radical approach is unrealistic not because of the strictures of the system that we’ve built to approach education, but because most people actually want a less radical approach… which, I guess, is why it’s been called radical all along. I tend to hear two kinds of feedback on my heuristic learning model: one, which shallowly agree with my craziness just because it is iconoclastic and different, and the other which dismisses it out of hand for breaking the rules of a system they’re entrenched with. I treasure those people, and those institutions that are able to give me nuanced feedback that will help me to refine and shape my curricular ideas into something more flexible and applicable to today’s educational landscape.
Of course I understand that every person, and every learner, has unique needs and doesn’t thrive in the same atmosphere. Some students will do better, and feel more secure in a highly-structured classroom. I can relate to this— I, by all accounts, succeeded academically in traditional educational systems. I practiced, I learned, I studied, I produced work on time, and I built connections that have helped me in my career. My negative relationship with institutionalized school comes from the way I felt dismissed, untrusted, and emotionally unsupported by most, though not all, school faculty and staff. It’s that atmosphere of mistrust and inhumanity that I most want to change about school. I think that has extreme relevance to curriculum design because the way we shape our units is also the way we presume to shape our student’s learning. I want create curriculum that precludes dehumanization of students.
Layered Curriculum
So my challenge has become: how do I design a curriculum for humanization? What formula can I use to allow students the correct level of choice, freedom, structure and support from within a system that is inherently teacher- and school-focused? This curriculum should: 1) never penalize students for taking their own path, for being disinterested in any particular subject matter, 2) produce students with distinct specializations 3) emphasize big-picture concepts, rather than basic discrete facts, as the common content basis. 4) encourage students to constantly interrogate their own understanding 5) challenge learners to break new ground, and develop new skills, for themselves 6) develop community adherence, interdependency, and know-how, 7) continually illustrate the precedence of all participants’s personal freedoms, rights, and sovereignty.
I’ve had a great time designing my bioenergetics curriculum, and it’s mostly convinced me that if and when I end up teaching at some kind of school that believes in grades and single-discipline teaching and whole-class curricula and coercive or standards-based topic-planning and other expectations I don’t really believe in, that I can still make a curriculum I’m proud to stand behind. Mostly, though, the project has opened up a lot of doors for me to walk through later. What does a classroom made entirely from student-created layered curriculum look like? How can I make a science lesson plan explicitly interdisciplinary? How can I facilitate whole-class democratic decision-making and topic choice? What different locations can I reasonably utilize to plant my students in a real-world setting? I’m confident that I can fake it as a teacher.
I’m specifically excited about turning my classroom into a layered-curriculum laboratory. For years, my ideal vision of a school, of a class, is to give students access to a number of resources - libraries, technology, farms, community centers, parks, study sites, laboratories, art galleries- and to encourage them to create coherent lines of inquiry and creation. Because I don’t think people really learn anything they’re not interested in, I need to give students the power and skills to nurture and fulfill their interests. The worst way that a student could feel coming out of a unit in my classroom is burned out. If my students can seamlessly transition between the joys and challenges of their lives and the topics they’re exploring in my curriculum— if the lessons and skills they’re developing “in class” blur with those they’re acquiring and using outside of school, if students know that they are respected as human beings, and understand they are being held to high expectations— I’ll feel like my work is done.