Negotiating the Curriculum

Educating For The 21st Century

Garth Boomer, Cynthia Onore, Nancy Lester, Jonathan Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135427368
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This work presents an ongoing international dialogue about the theory and Practice Of Curriculum Negotiating In The Classroom At Elementary, primary, secondary and university levels.

Part B

Cases

INTRODUCTION

A central argument we are making about negotiating the curriculum, as it is been theorized and explored in this book, is that it is not, and ought not to be, envisioned or applied as a rigid or static set of techniques. Rather, negotiating the curriculum is a set of theoretical principles of teaching and learning. Nowhere in this volume is this more in evidence than here in ‘Cases’. In the playing out and enactment of negotiating the curriculum, we're given the opportunity, by being invited into the classrooms of reflective negotiators, to gain the greatest understanding of how teaching and learning actions are derived from theoretical principles. The multiple voices which narrate these case stories demonstrate a range of meanings and provide us with pictures of the various possibilities which curriculum negotiation might hold for transforming teaching and learning.

Demonstration is a powerful way from which to learn. In ‘Cases’, we see teachers and learners doing. And what they do is framed and driven by the theoretical principles of teaching that are negotiating the curriculum. Given that the reflective negotiators in ‘Cases’ have not applied negotiating the curriculum as a predetermined regime, we should not be surprised that what we will see going on will be varied and various ways into and ways of reflecting the teaching and learning theory of curriculum negotiation. Differences in application exist, we would claim, for the following two interconnected reasons.

1 How we read the word and the world

Because negotiating the curriculum is set within a social constructivist view of the world (its theory of teaching and learning is also derived from such a view), it follows that those of us who attempt to build our practice around it, will inevitably ‘read’ it (interpret it) in light of our past and current experiences, beliefs, and values about teaching and learning, the contexts in which we are working, the colleagues with whom we work, the books we have read, and so on. In other words, who we are inevitably shapes how and what and why we see. And this accounts for the different results, the range of meanings, and the various possibilities we will see in the cases which follow.

We would argue, however, that the ultimate goal is to build shared interpretations and communal ways of seeing and reading curriculum negotiation, and that it is on the level of theory that collaborative views can best be achieved.

2 How we practice

In ‘Cases’, we will see a variety of teachers and learners grappling with negotiating the curriculum. We might call some of them apprenticed negotiators, while others might be seen as practised negotiators. This is not a distinction of expertise; nor is it a valorization of the myth that practice makes perfect. Rather, it is a way of distinguishing those who are new to curriculum negotiation and those who have been working at it for a longer time. We will see that all the negotiators in these cases are learners. It is the focus of their learning which seems to shift when the negotiators have had more experience, more incidents to reflect on and to learn from, and it is the focus of learning which we wished to bring to your attention.

And along with shining a spotlight on the focus of their learning, we wanted to represent a range of negotiator voices. We were particularly sensitive to ensuring that the voices of the apprenticed negotiators be heard. Much of what we read in our professional literature seems to come from those who sound pretty sure about what they think and do. The writing is polished, the thoughts neatly organized and laid out. While this may be the result of publication demands, it still leaves us with a void. How do we sound when in the midst of learning? How do we sound when confronting dissonance in and discomfort around our teaching? How do we sound when we are just not sure about what is going on and why? What is valuable about hearing these learning voices is just that: We learn what learners sound like. And this can help us to learn how to respond and build meanings with them.

The Cases

In attempting to begin to transform their theories of teaching and learning, the apprenticed negotiators focus their learning on confronting head-on some of the myths of teaching and learning which have grown out of their experiences and which comprise, at the time they had begun to enact curriculum negotiation, their current theories of teaching and learning. Among some of these myths we may count: teachers are experts; students are empty vessels; knowledge is a commodity; motivation can be developed from the outside-in; teachers are sole authorities and wielders of power in the classroom. What we will see, then, is how the apprenticed negotiators ‘read’ their new curriculum negotiation situation against their current theories.

In chapter 12, Christine Cook continues to wrestle with her power and authority in the classroom. She has not yet been able to work out co-intentional learning. The chief challenge to her is to understand the connection between how students act and why they act the way they do; or as Eleanor Duckworth (1987) says, ‘giving students reason'. That is, is it possible to separate intention from behaviour? At the time of this writing, Christine seems to have settled on the conclusion that behaviour is independent from intention and this conclusion forces her back into a position of power and authority that is inconsistent with curriculum negotiation. It is crucial, however, to see how she struggles towards a deeper understanding of these issues. Even though she is still poised on this precipice, she is also still willing to explore the dissonances between her competing theories of teaching and learning, particularly those having to do with the construction and control of knowledge.

In her reflections on a chronicle of a jointly taught interdisciplinary course (chapter 13), Chris Louth, with the additional insight that distanced reflection can provide, begins to critique the whys of negotiating that she and Doug Young, her co-author and co-teacher, employed. What Chris seems to be wrestling with is the difference between applying curriculum negotiation as a theory of teaching and learning rather than a mindless set of predetermined steps. Her mostly fruitless search for why and how students might have learned differently from the ways they had traditionally learned in her's and Doug's chronicle of their team taught curriculum negotiated course illuminates the theoretical core of curriculum negotiation. Further, it enables Chris to identify a critical aspect that was missing from their understanding of negotiating the curriculum as they enacted it which, in turn, heightens Chris' discomfort. The discomfort, like Christine Cook's dissonance, will propel Chris to deeper understandings and enactments of curriculum negotiation.

Stephanie Siegel's and Ellen Skelly's apprenticed negotiator stances in chapters 6 and 8 pivot around still another issue: Outside-in versus inside-out motivation. Because they are working with mostly disenfranchised students — students who, because of their colour and/or language, have been politically, socially, and culturally denied equal access to quality education — Ellen and Stephanie attempted to use curriculum negotiation as a device to motivate these students to learn. They grapple with two critical parts of these contradictory inside-out/outside-in principles of motivation: (i) ‘coming clean’ with their students about what they are trying to do; and (ii) distinguishing mere choice, that is, choice among teacher-decided options, from genuine intention to learn. The value for Stephanie and Ellen of making these issues explicit and ‘talking’ them through with an experienced negotiator (chapter 7) is that they were able to examine and revise the issues with the goal of reconciling their theories of teaching and learning.

We have, with Jo-Anne Reid's and Susan Hyde's chapters, ‘Negotiating Education’, (chapter 9) and ‘Negotiating Mathematics’, (chapter 4) respectively, two historical artifacts. Both chapters were in the 1982 version of Negotiating the Curriculum. Both chapters were read by all of the other negotiators in this section. Jo-Anne and Susan provided the first demonstrations of curriculum negotiation which guided the practical experiments of the other negotiators in ‘Cases’. Interestingly, Jo-Anne (in chapter 10 with Betty Thwaites) and Susan (in chapter 5) build on their respective ‘historical’ chapters to tell their new stories. The case reports in chapters 4 and 9 reflect a rich understanding that negotiating the curriculum is a theory of teaching and learning which leads Susan and Jo-Anne to integrating curriculum negotiation more productively into their classrooms.

What seems to be the common thread in the remaining cases — Susan Hyde (chapter 5), Garth Boomer (chapter 7), Jo-Anne Reid (with Betty Thwaites) (chapter 10), Nancy Lester (chapter 11), and Cynthia (Cindy) Onore (chapter 14) — is that all of the authors are teachers of teachers in various teaching/learning contexts and, thus, working side-by-side with other practitioners to enact and reflect on curriculum negotiation.

There are two important common strands running throughout these cases. First, from both what they say and from what they do, all of these experienced negotiators seem to have shared interpretations of and to have come to communal agreement on the teaching and learning theory of negotiation the curriculum.

Secondly, while they argue for this current conception and enact its principles, none of them stops questioning, inquiring into, or critiquing that conception. This means, of course, that there is room for them to transform their current conceptions. By engaging in the acts of teaching teachers, observing teachers, and writing to, with, and about them, and then reflecting on these experiences, these more experienced negotiators have presented themselves with and in a situation which talks back to them and, as a result, might, indeed, lead to transformation. The experienced negotiators in these cases focus their learning on attempts to push the ‘meta’ envelope on how we read the word and the world of curriculum negotiation.

Susan writes in chapter 5 unashamedly in the mode of one who is passing along insights and advice gleaned over many years of reflective practice in negotiation. At the same time she offers advice, she is open about her own neglect of this advice in her moment-to-moment teaching. One of the most crucial ‘meta’ focuses for Susan is how she sets out to reconcile the micro-events of her classroom with the macro-forces of schooling and the wider society. She recognizes that curriculum negotiation has created the context for these forces to arise; now she is intent upon using curriculum negotiation to work on and work out contradictions and injustices.

Garth's writing to Ellen and Stephanie is a way for him to talk about how he now conceives and thinks about negotiating the curriculum. He is, however, forced to look at and reexamine the theory in a new and, to him, unfamiliar context of two inner-city schools and with two apprenticed negotiators who are at a crucial juncture in their own understanding. By having the familiar made strange, Garth is given the unique opportunity to see his vision of curriculum negotiation recast, with the possibility that he will create enriched versions that will inform us about how we can think about and act out curriculum negotiation in twenty-first century classrooms.

Jo-Anne wants to reconstrue curriculum negotiation within a framework of action research. As action research, negotiating the curriculum may support teachers not only to think and reflect-/n-action and think and reflect-on-action, but support teachers to reconstrue themselves in the process of that thinking, reflecting, and acting. Jo-Anne attempts to ‘reread’ and ‘rewrite’ curriculum negotiation in order to broaden the insights negotiation might contribute to the wider social, cultural, and political school life of teachers.

In the context of a university teacher education course, Nancy focuses mainly on assessment issues in curriculum negotiation. She pushes to understand, redefine, and transform the direct cause and effect relationship students make between ‘getting an A’ and learning. The battle to demystify the teacher as sole expert and examiner continues to be waged here, and while there is still no definitive set of answers, the context in which this case takes place gives us new insights and raises new questions to inform our conversation and push our collective understandings of the role curriculum negotiation can play in providing alternative ways of being.

The insights we might gain from being an observer, a noter, a ‘fly on the wall’ in a colleague's classroom are invaluable as Cindy shows in her case. By sitting in and watching and listening to Mrs Gillis and her students' enactments of curriculum negotiation, Cindy not only gains understanding about Mrs Gillis’ understanding, but she is able to assess how young children learn in a negotiated context as well. This ‘double vision’, if you will, allows Cindy to enrich her current conception of curriculum negotiation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part A Theoretical and Technical Framework [Foundations]
• Part B Cases
• Part C New Theoretical Perspectives on Negotiating the Curriculum
• Selected Bibliography
• Index