Curriculum Making
When I was asked to write this Palgrave Pivot book in the Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education Series, I was delighted and honored by the invitation. Curriculum making, reciprocal learning, and the best-loved self is a topic dear to my heart. The Palgrave Pivot invitation and my research niche complemented one another; they fit together like hand-in-glove. The opportunity was one I would not want to miss. However, despite my high interest, best intentions, and past publishing record, this volume has not been easy to get off the ground. My mother died shortly after I signed the contract to publish this book. While I was able to resume the majority of my myriad of activities after her funeral, I could not bring myself to this writing task. It presented a formidable challenge. Rather than remaining stuck in a “hardened story” (Conle, 1996) that determined what I could and could not do, I decided to plunge the depths and write toward the pain as others have suggested (i.e., Waldman, 2016; Ward, 2016). I will not burden readers with the breadth and depth of what I personally uncovered in my reflective analysis. However, I do want to underscore three critically important points as to why my mother’s passing and the authoring of this book became inexorably linked.
The first is this. My mother had two children—my deceased brother, who was her hometown success—and me. I was a daughter born over a decade after her son. Massive changes had happened in the interim. My mother needed a different plotline for me. Her father, a British immigrant to Canada, had fought in World War I and two of her brothers, one who went on to be a leader in the Canadian Armed Forces, served in World War II. All of this preceded me becoming my mother’s child for the world. Consequently, I attended university, something my immediate family members had not done. I furthermore left the “breadbasket of the world” (a prairie province) and lived my adult life near the Rocky Mountains in Canada and in the Gulf Coast region of the US. I also have traveled extensively and delivered plenary addresses on all but one of the world’s continents. Not once did my mother ever suggest that I preempt an international engagement to spend more time with her. In short, I was doing—am doing—what she had in mind for me. Engaging in deep reflection, I discovered a synergy between the international backdrop of the reciprocal learning book series and the parental story my mother bestowed on me at birth. A correspondence as “invisible as air” and as “weightless as dreams” (Stone, 1988, p. 244) became perceptible after her death.
The second commonplace of experience (Lane, 1988) connecting this book project to my mother is the fact that she was a proud Canadian. Among the possessions she left me were a Canadian flag and her treasured maple leaf pin. Clearly, she did not want me to forget the Canadian part of my dual citizenship (Canadian + American). Thinking backward into my life, I recall her asking more questions about the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project than she did about my other US-based research initiatives. I always attributed her special interest in the reciprocal learning project to her being a staunch Canadian. However, my look back revealed something I probably intuitively knew but had not said out-loud. When I attended the Canadian conferences biennially, I always went to see my mother before or after the meetings. This meant that every second year she was assured of an extra visit from me. Hence, I have a special connection to the Canada-China project because of my mother’s ongoing reminders that I am Canadian and because of my own bred-in-the-bone allegiance to my family, my home country, and my birth identity. I also visit China twice annually because of a long-term collaboration there, along with a bevy of former doctoral students and former visiting scholars who I visit regularly. For these multiple interconnected reasons, I would not want this endeavor to receive anything less than my fullest attention in the aftermath of my mother’s death.
The third major point my soul-searching brought to light has to do with heart. My mother was the lifeblood of my family just as curriculum is the lifeblood of schools. Without her, neither my brother nor I would have had breath or life. Without curriculum, teachers, students, and schools are rudderless and lacking in purpose. For a time following my mother’s death, I, too, drifted aimlessly. My beacon of support was gone. No longer did I have her anchoring me. Also, as long as she lived, I would not be the sole surviving member of my nuclear family. However, my father died in 2000 and my brother passed away the year before my mother. Their individual and collective deaths irrevocably changed my life. A piece of me departed with them. Unavoidably, my identity shifted. My attempt to un-know what I already knew (Vinz, 1997) about being the lone family survivor likewise drove a wedge between the writing of this book and me.
The Curriculum-Teaching Puzzle
When I acknowledged these painful connections, I dislodged my stuck story. I stripped it of its ruling power. I was free to focus full attention on Curriculum making, reciprocal learning, and the best-loved self. I begin now with curriculum making, the first of two curriculum chapters contributing to my tripartite agenda. Because curriculum making cannot happen without teachers, let me begin by asserting teachers’ primacy in the educational enterprise, which is much like my mother’s primacy in my family and in my life…
The Primacy of Teachers
“Teachers matter….” That is what OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, concluded more than a decade and a half ago based on a 25-country study reported in the official policy statement, Teachers Matters: Attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers (OECD, 2005). “Teachers matter…” OECD reconfirmed in 2018 in Valuing our teachers and raising their status (Schleicher, 2018). “Teachers matter…” the Varkey Foundation (2016), sponsor of the Global Teacher Prize, proclaimed. “Teachers matter” was a recent feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Jenkins, 2016). “Teacher education matters…” asserted leading US researcher, Linda Darling Hammond (2000), in her article, “How teacher education matters.” “Teacher education matters…” stated William Schmidt and his colleagues (2011) in Teacher education matters: A study of middle school mathematics teacher preparation in six countries. “Teacher education matters…,” wrote Frances Rust (2017, p. 383) in a recent Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice editorial. “Preparing teachers to teach matters,” stressed Suzanne Wilson (2014, p. 190). “Making teacher education matter” headlined Jean Clandinin and Jukka Husu in the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (Husu & Clandinin, 2017, p. 1169) “Teacher quality matters,” added Christopher Day (2017) in Teachers’ worlds and work. “Teacher quality matters,” noted Gregory Ramsey in the Australia Department of Education document, Quality matters, Revitalising teaching: Critical times, Critical choices (Ramsey, 2000, p. 1). “Teaching quality matters most,” declared Dan Goldhaber (2016) in his half-century celebration of the Coleman Report, the most influential American policy document following the Brown vs. Board of Education court ruling. The quality of a nation’s education cannot supersede “the quality of its teachers,” wrote Barber and Mourshed (2007, p. 13) in the McKinsey Report. Even actor, Matt Damon, whose mother is a teacher, has widely claimed that he and presumably others would not be where they are today without creative teachers. Educational researchers, supranational organizations, and popular opinion affirm the age-old maxim that “the influence of a good teacher can never be erased.”
However, despite widespread agreement about the importance of teachers, research largely focuses on stakeholders, and what they think preservice and practicing teachers should know and do. What preservice and practicing teachers need to flourish in their teaching careers has received comparatively little attention. Also, most of what has been written has been of an abstract bent. A scarcity of research addresses what is fundamentally important to growing, nurturing, and sustaining quality teachers in their own terms. If I distilled my 25 years of researching teaching and teacher education into a handful of topics, one recurrent theme would certainly be teachers’ desires to be curriculum makers. A topic not far behind would be teachers’ riling against others casting the...