Curriculum Fragments

This book builds upon Louise Berman’s late 20th-century framing of life processes to inform school curriculum, by proposing a new curriculum project that extends and reframes Berman in and beyond schooling. Using the well-established curriculum theorizing method, currere, the author focuses on seven life processes, including knowing, loving, losing, growing, forgiving, relating, and hoping. Each of these is approached using currere-oriented, autobiographical fragments – stories from the author’s own lived experiences in education and life – that illuminate the educational, curricular, and pedagogical possibilities of each of the seven processes using past, present, and future perspectives, which the author calls curriculum fragments. These curriculum fragments are tied to historical and contemporary curriculum theorizing and educational theory and practice, in order to suggest considerations for movement for the reader, scholar, educator, and leader. It ultimately asks whether humanity can create a joyful, beautiful, and just curriculum of life for each and every person through schooling and beyond, and consequently, a better world built on love. Focusing on real-life experiences in school and life that have educational implications and that can inform the curriculum, the field of curriculum studies, and the act of curriculum theorizing, this book will appeal to curriculum scholars interested in using currere, understanding patterns of use, participating in the production of curriculum and educational knowledge in the field, and perceiving and using curriculum theorizing as an integral part of their daily work.

"Comprehensive in scope, this book thoroughly lays out what a classroom teacher or curriculum developer needs to do to create an effective curriculum that can then be adapted into actual classroom instruction." —Stephen D. Shepperd, Principal Sunnyside Elementary School, Kellogg, ID Translate standards into classroom curriculum that fulfills accountability requirements and meets students′ learning needs! Meeting the individual needs of students and the requirements of federal mandates is a challenge that educators face every day. This third edition of an award-winning book focuses on curriculum, content standards, teaching, and testing and provides teachers with solid guidelines for best practices. In this detailed, comprehensive guide, Pearl Gold Solomon discusses the bridge between the written and the taught curriculum and gives readers a big-picture overview of how the current political environment and public opinion affect standards and curriculum. The book offers: An up-to-date review of educational research, including how learning takes place Ways to connect curriculum and standards to best teaching practices Information on traditional, alternative, and high-stakes assessments Expanded coverage of how best to plan and implement professional development This information-rich resource is an indispensable tool for all educators who want to make informed and meaningful decisions to promote standards-based instruction, improve student outcomes, and create the best possible environments for learning.

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In Understanding the Boundary between Disability Studies and Special Education through Consilience, Self-Study, and Radical Love, the authors explore what it means to engage in boundary work at the intersection of traditional special education systems and critical disability studies in education. The book consists of fifteen groundbreaking accounts that challenge dominant medicalized discourses about what it means to exist within and around special education systems that create space for new conceptions of what it means to teach, lead, learn, and exist within a conciliatory space driven by radical love and disability justice principles. The book pushes readers to consider how their own personal, professional and programmatic future transformational actions can be driven by disruption and the desire for freedom from the hegemony of traditional special education and White and Ability supremacy.

Provoking Curriculum Studies pushes forward a strong reading of the theoretical and methodological innovations taking place within curriculum studies research. Addressing an important gap in contemporary curriculum studies—conceptualizing scholars as poets and the potential of the poetic in education—it offers a framework for doing curriculum work at the intersection of the arts, social theory, and curriculum studies. Drawing on poetic inquiry, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, life writing, and several types of arts-based research methodologies, this diverse collection spotlights the intellectual genealogies of curriculum scholars such as Ted Aoki, Geoffrey Milburn and Roger Simon, whose provocations, inquiries, and recursive questioning link the writing and re-writing of curriculum theory to acts of strong poetry. Readers are urged to imagine alternative ways in which professors, teachers, and university students might not only engage with but disrupt, blur, and complicate curriculum theory across interdisciplinary topographies in order to seek out blind impresses—those areas of knowledge that are left over, unaddressed by ‘mainstream’ curriculum scholarship, and that instigate difficult questions about death, trauma, prejudice, poverty, colonization, and more.

This book brings attention to the understudied and often overlooked question of how curricula and classroom practices might inadvertently reproduce exclusionary discourses and narratives that omit or negate particular cultures, histories, and wisdom traditions. With a focus on representations and classroom practices related especially to ancient and Indigenous wisdom traditions and cultures, it includes unique contributions from scholars studying these questions in various contexts. The book offers a range of important studies from various contexts across the Americas, including Canada, the various member nations of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), Puerto Rico, and the United States. The various chapter contributions address and discuss nuances of each of the contexts under study. The contributions also help highlight some key commonalities across these contexts, including how dominant discourses and various forces have historically shaped—and continue to shape and reproduce— such omissions, misrepresentations, and marginalization. In addition to seeking to reconcile with some of these ancient and Indigenous wisdom traditions and cultures, the book charts a path forward toward more holistic analytical frameworks as well as more inclusive and balanced representations and classroom practices in these aforementioned geographic contexts and beyond. It will appeal to scholars, researchers, undergraduate, and graduate students with interests in Indigenous education, curriculum studies, citizenship education, history of education, religion, and educational policy.

Understanding the Te Whriki Approach is a much-needed source of information for those wishing to extend and consolidate their understanding of the Te Whriki approach, introducing the reader to an innovative bicultural curriculum developed for early childhood services in New Zealand. It will enable the reader to analyse the essential elements of this approach to early childhood and its relationship to quality early years practice. Providing students and practitioners with the relevant information about a key pedagogical influence on high quality early years practice in the United Kingdom, the book explores all areas of the curriculum, emphasising: strong curriculum connections to families and the wider community; a view of teaching and learning that focuses on responsive and reciprocal relationships with people, places and things; a view of curriculum content as cross-disciplinary and multi-modal; the aspirations for children to grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body, and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society; a bicultural framework in which indigenous voices have a central place. Written to support the work of all those in the field of early years education and childcare, this is a vital text for students, early years and childcare practitioners, teachers, early years professionals, children's centre professionals, lecturers, advisory teachers, head teachers and setting managers.