Curricular Conversations

“Applebee's central point, the need to teach 'knowledge in context,' is absolutely crucial for the hopes of any reformed curriculum. His experience and knowledge give his voice an authority that makes many of the current proposals on both the left and right seem shallow by comparison.”—Gerald Graff, University of Chicago

Schools need to have purchase on the curriculum: why they teach the subjects beyond preparation for examinations, what they are intending to achieve with the curriculum, how well it is planned and enacted in classrooms and how they know whether it’s doing what it’s supposed to. Fundamental to this understanding are the conversations between subject leaders and their line managers. However, there is sometimes a mismatch between the subject specialisms of senior leaders and those they line manage. If I don’t know the terrain and the importance of a particular subject, how can I talk intelligently with colleagues who are specialists? This book sets out to offer some tentative answers to these questions. Each of the national curriculum subjects is discussed with a subject leader and provides an insight into what they view as the importance of the subject, how they go about ensuring that knowledge, understanding and skills are developed over time, how they talk about the quality of the schemes in their departments and what they would welcome from senior leaders by way of support. We have chosen this way of opening up the potentially difficult terrain of expertise on one side and relative lack of expertise on the other, by providing these case studies. They are suggested as prompts rather than the last word. Informed debate is, after all, the fuel of curriculum development. And why Huh? Well, 'Huh?' may be John's first response when he walks into a Year 8 German class but, in fact, we chose 'Huh' as the title of our book as he is the Egyptian god of endlessness. As Claire Hill so eloquently comments in her chapter, “Curriculum development is an ongoing process; it’s not going to be finished, ever.” And we believe that 'Huh' captures a healthy and expansive way of considering curriculum conversations.

Textbook

"How do I pick a theme that all my students can get involved in?" "Teaching with themes doesn't work. I can never get the kids beyond the level of skills work." "I have ESL students who understand content areas conceptually in their native language, but find it hard to express their ideas in English. If I could help them put it all together, they'll be more successful." If this sounds familiar to you, you'll welcome this concise and helpful book on the "whys" and "hows" of building and implementing a thematically unified curriculum. The twenty-nine themes outlined in Curricular Conversations cover all sorts of interests and subject matters. These themes are not presented as prepackaged activity sets but in a framework with outlines of strategies and techniques. By combining the theory and application of teaching with themes, Curricular Conversations: helps teachers and students to move beyond skills and facts to higher-level thinking processes; demonstrates how the themes work in real life; shows teachers and students how to generate their own thematic units; includes a bibliography of more than 1,000 children's books in English and Spanish and from various cultural backgrounds; gives teachers support material in an appendix full of sample forms and charts for organizing and managing class discussions and investigations. The key word here is "conversations." The authors feel that all students-whatever their abilities, languages, or literacy levels may be-should be able to join in and be engaged by the conversations about so many interesting things that a theme holds.

The central theme of Curricular Conversations is this: Play is the thing that brings aesthetic curricular complications near educators and their students, making the lived consequences very vivid, tangible, and possible. Viewing curriculum as genuine inquiry into what is worth knowing, rather than simply a curricular document, this book explores the significances instilled and nurtured through aesthetic play. Each chapter delves into the space a given artwork reveals. The artworks act as points of departure and/or generative vehicles, foregrounding the roles and possibilities of play within curricular conversations. Looking at relevant educational issues, traditions, and theorists through an illuminating lens, this book speaks to curriculum theorists and arts educators everywhere.

“Applebee's central point, the need to teach 'knowledge in context,' is absolutely crucial for the hopes of any reformed curriculum. His experience and knowledge give his voice an authority that makes many of the current proposals on both the left and right seem shallow by comparison.”—Gerald Graff, University of Chicago

This primer for teachers (prospective and practicing) asks readers to question the historical present and their relation to it, and in so doing, to construct their own understandings of what it means to teach, to study, to become "educated" in the present moment. Curriculum theory is the scholarly effort – inspired by theory in the humanities, arts and interpretive social sciences – to understand the curriculum, defined here as "complicated conversation." Rather than the formulation of objectives to be evaluated by (especially standardized) tests, curriculum is communication informed by academic knowledge, and it is characterized by educational experience. Pinar recasts school reform as school deform in which educational institutions devolve into cram schools preparing for standardized exams, and traces the history of this catastrophe starting in 1950s. Changes in the Second Edition: Introduces Pinar’s formulation of allegories-of-the-present — a concept in which subjectivity, history, and society become articulated through the teacher’s participation in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum; features a new chapter on Weimar Germany (as an allegory of the present); includes new chapters on the future, and on the promises and risks of technology.

Advancing a unified, principled approach that aims for high quality/high equity educational outcomes, this book offers clear, realistic guidelines for the tasks of writing curriculum documents and designing official syllabi and professional development programs at system and school levels.