These are my concluding remarks for a particular course.
I always debate what to call this final commentary: summary, parting shots, conclusions… I’ve chosen Swan Song as my metaphor because of its musical connotations: Chopin’s D-flat major nocturne and Les Sylphides; Saint-Seäns’ The Swan, and Tchaikovsky’s monstrous parody-able Swan Lake – of course, there I’m not sure whether I’m the prince, Odette, Odile. Or even the evil enchanter Von Rothbart who usually hides behind the scenes. Unintended consequences abound with each act or stance in curriculum theory. I’m working towards and unfolding of the theoretical origami that is the design of this course.
Beware of those with a little power for they will cause you no end of delays and petty griefs as they try to impose their personas upon you. Fear those with major power for they will do harm to you and all those about you, often in the guise of doing good – but it’s usually the good as defined from their particular point of view which is always self-serving and usually bullying and often using uniformity to hide complexity. Very few people have learned the message of Laozi (Lao Tzu), Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. about peace and following the middle way, about collaborating and committing, and about kindness, caring, and love.
As curriculum workers with the elementary school curriculum, we collaborate to build complex structures that provide experiences and activities for learners based on our knowledge of learning and socio-political expectations. These structures are autobiographical and collaborative when enacted in the classroom, despite attempts at control that have been built outside the classroom. One key to curriculum is entrancing the children to collude in the construction of that curriculum in which they are learning.
Change is the great need. Change is subjective and contextual. Notice that I do not say it is good! It disrupts the status quo and forces us to think. Sometimes it leads to negative consequences, which force further change in quest of situational amelioration. Sometimes it leads to positive consequences, which policy wonks often attribute wrongly to their “inspired” interventions and mandates. All learning requires change, or we enter the surreal world of insanity. [An aside for the religious republican right: We have lived in a democratic socialist republic since Theodore Roosevelt (a republican from New York) was president, so get over it, and stop the name calling.]
The pragmatist imposes a harsh reality by claiming that what is good is what works. This is too simplistic and circular for me because my autobiographical judgment suggest that declaring success often has unintended consequences in both the short and long term. So you should see that I am not a disciple of John Dewey as a pragmatist.
You might consider me a radical progressivist following Dewey along that line into functionalism and instrumentalism. I do not belong there either. To be a progressive I would have to see change as good and the results of human technology as producing the greatest good for the greatest number of people. I have traveled the world and lived in New Orleans too long, dealing with many layers of unintended consequences of change to accept it blindly as good. Do not confuse my advocacy of technology with a belief that technology is good; the use of technology can be for good or for evil, and we cannot legislate good use of technology without accepting its dangers. The tool can be used to feed the poor or to murder them; it depends on who uses it and how. We live in a society compelled to replicate a culture of violence because we live in a culture of violence rather than one of caring (see Nell Noddings from more on caring). Our metaphors are rife with violence: the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Illiteracy, the War on Terrorism… We bully and have come to expect the Mandate of Heaven as a birthright while bullying every culture and country on the globe, but I make no claim to pacifism as the sole way in life for a moral code forces change and that makes actions unpredictable especially against an imperial mandate curriculum (see Said on Orientalism).
So where do I draw my passion for learning, teaching and knowing? How is that related to this course? The sources are multiple: post-modernism (Foucault), ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner), instrumentalism and linguistic theory (Chomsky, Sapir, Whorf, Levi-Strauss), multiple intelligences (Gardner), moral/ethical development (Kohlberg, Gillian, Turiel), hedonism (Epicurus, Lakatos), life-long learning (Erikson, Knowles), constructivism (Glassersfeld), social constructivism (Vygotsky and his followers), and curriculum theory (Pinar). We always have more to learn, more to think, more to talk about. But as curriculum workers the source of greatest change is ourselves talking about how our communities can work together to build a world more to our liking while doing as little harm as possible – and that is a major basis for the structure of this course. Thus, we choose various values for inculcation and demonstration, and not others; Benjamin Franklin’s list of virtues is instructive:
7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful Deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
12. CHASTITY. Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring; Never to Dulness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another's Peace or Reputation.
I’m not quite there yet, but he still has more to say than most of our current politicians with their weak-kneed support for education while misunderstanding most of what good teachers do.
I have, through the years of reading, thinking, observing, and participating in education, become a heterodox post-postmodern. I see layered interpretations and unintended consequences in many settings while rejecting many using my ethical/moral system. This is subjective and autobiographical, but intellectual, as I believe all decision-making MUST BE.
The lived autobiographical experiences of those engaged in the classroom, or whatever the learning environment, are the curriculum. It is not materials or a program or a mandate from on high. In our post-post-modern, value-laden society, the teacher and students in a classroom are engaged in the primary curriculum work and that is where the control belongs. They belong to an ethic of service and caring that rejects the current ethic of “I’m gonna get everything I can get in any way that I can unless someone catches me”. The rejection of this ethic that has built wealth and power for the plutocrats of our country needs to be touted as an evil that we must eradicate, but that is certainly my bias.
The change we must build is what I have modeled in this classroom: thinking teachers taking control of their learning within a context of schooling constructed within urban environments. Good teachers know what they are doing. They know children and the social contexts of their children, the communities wherein the children live. They observe data and use theories to organize their practices. They engage children and examine behaviors and performances. They guide the paths of inquiry for their students, structuring a way towards change that entices learners into active collusion. No matter what they know or expect, the curriculum theorist-teacher is learning more, changing, trying new things, seeking new experiences for self and learners so that children develop processes for negotiating their own way to active citizenship in the world. The test isn’t the answer; living well with self and others in community is!
This semester you have been forging your own way as a group, a team, through various ideas and practices related to elementary curriculum. This is what professional development entails. It is a commitment to learning and intellectual pursuits, that include data, theory, and argumentation, with a goal of changing your practices to make them work as valuable activities for the learners in your classrooms and future classrooms.
Here endeth the rant! Thanks for a good semester!
--RBS
No comments:
Post a Comment