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Curriculum Connections Bennett Smith - Coggle Diagram
Curriculum Connections
Bennett Smith
Reform, Critique, Reflection
Dewey and the 20th century critique of "traditional schooling"
“To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of the opportunities of present life; to static aims and materials is opposed acquaintance with a changing world.” (Dewey, p. 2)
Apple's critique of a national curriculum
“A national curriculum may be seen as a device for accountability, to help us establish benchmarks so that parents can evaluate schools. But it also puts into motion a system in which children themselves will be ranked and ordered as never before. One of its primary roles will be to act as "a mechanism for differentiating children more rigidly against fixed norms, the social meanings and derivation of which are not available for scrutiny"4” ([Apple, 1993, p. 8]
Standards and the eval they enable can be criticized
“A national curriculum is crucial here. Its major value does not lie in its supposed encouragement of standardized goals and content and of levels of achievement in what are considered the most important subject areas. This, of course, should not be totally dismissed. However, its major role is in providing the framework within which national testing can function.” ([Apple, 1993, p. 8]
curriculum design for schooling will inevitably have political salience
“It is to a large extent the cultural product of societies that assumed the future would be much like the past, and yet it is used as educational food in a society where change is the rule, not the exception.” ([Dewey, p. 2]
21st Century skills try to look forward, not back
Friere (1970): education as a process of social transformation -- specifically, the overturning of structures of oppression
any examples of Frierian curricula?
Lau (2001): transitioning from a modernist to a post-modern approach to curriculum design
my feeling is that none of the models we've seen is especially postmodern
Design Principles & Models
Standards-based design
It's not clear to me how the standards movement thinks students learn, or whether that is important to the movement
Standards promise accountability, consistency of outcomes, and transparency of learning expectations (among other things). (Martin-Kniep, 2000)
Apple's critique of the standards movement has been echoed in the work of people like Rakow (2008), who writes that "The accountability movement has pushed us away from seeing the whole child." I link this to Apple's critique because he thought that the movement was never primarily about improving outcomes for individual children, but accomplishing a political goal.
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21st-century skills framework
Schools need to adapt in order to better prepare students for the ways that we anticipate the 21st century will be different from what came before
Hall (1975) -- include goals, hopes, aims, objectives, teaching and learning, evaluation and assessment, and modifications (p. 67)
Universal Design for Learning
Curriculum design principles based in cognitive science
UDL is maybe the most explicitly "scientistic" of the paradigms we've seen
Learning Theory & Cognitive Science
Constructivism and Constructionism
Dewey's ideas, particularly the emphasis on experience, appear to be constructivist
seems to underpin most models
Cognitive constructivism
Ideas from Piaget, including:
Disequilibrium between own and others' ideas revealed in social contexts cause cognitive development (actually sort of more SC than CC)
Defending ideas is an essential part of cognitive development
Children progress through stages of cognitive development that constrain their capacities (but to a lesser extent than the stereotyped version of his thought suggests)
A focus on general structures of cognition, including operations such as conservation, seriation and classification
-- all ideas paraphrased from Brown et al., 1996
Constructionism
Heavy focus on technology as a means of producing artifacts of learning
21st century skills celebrate tech too
Social constructivism
Ideas from Vygotsky, including:
The zone of proximal development
Internalization/appropriation: "what children can do now in social interaction becomes, in time, part of their independent repertoires" (Brown et al., 1996, p. 147)