Category: EDCI532

When I first began the course at the start of the month, I had [commented] that to me, curriculum is like drawing an Ouroboros; the snake devouring its own tail. The comparison is that like the artist contemplating to begin creating the artwork starting from the head versus the tail, discourse in curriculum follows a similar vein where the argument is over designing curriculum based on “what should be taught” versus “how it should be taught”.

Egan (2020) commented on that former approach in our curriculum where we focused on delivering breadth of knowledge, at the expense of spending time combing the depths of select topics, had a negative impact on students’ engagement. He is clearly favoring a “how it should be taught” approach with this mindset. Having students be able to discover discipline in engaging deeply with a topic will allow them to develop self-motivation and ultimately find joy being immersed. Yet this could be flipped around to justify a “what to teach” approach by narrowing down the list of topics to what students are interested in, or what the teacher feels to be vital tenants of a course. Which leads back to my metaphor of the snake drawing. Curriculum (or course) design is circular in nature as it is difficult to isolate one view from the other if teachers are invested in the students’ best interests. At least, this was my original view.

In “Procedures of Power in Curriculum Discourse: Conversation From Home”, Blades (1995) illustrates how the curriculum designers at Alberta Education gave the final decision of “what should be taught” to representatives from post-secondary institutions. This happened despite having talks with various stakeholders such as teachers and practicing professionals, but curiously, did not include those who would be most affected by the change: the students. Given that BC has recently re-designed our curriculum, I can’t help but wonder if similar exclusionary politics were involved as well. Luckily, us teachers have respectable amount of autonomy in our classroom and are not forced to strictly adhere to every part of the curriculum. However, this simply transfers that privilege of power from the ministry to teachers, where we have our own explicit and implicit biases. The most notable of which is how comfortable we are with inclusion of Indigenous ways of knowing.

Most educators were raised and trained in the predominant Western education system; many of us were uncomfortable implementing Indigenous perspectives into our classrooms. Donald (2009), humbles us by pointing out common fallacies used in resistance to teaching Aboriginal Education (AbEd): disqualification by lacking subject knowledge, fear of disrupting of current practices, or taking a neutral perspective as all views are equal. I admit, I have found myself using some, if not all, of these excuses in my practices thus far. The first rationale is faulty as many teachers are tasked with teaching subjects outside of their specialty or knowledge anyways. Recusing yourself from teaching AbEd is simply what Felman calls “Ignorance… nothing more than a desire to ignore” (Nahachewsky and Slomp, 2009). The second point frames Western and Indigenous education as being antagonistic with one another. This is born from the preconception that there can only exist a singular answer or one correct form of knowledge. Yet much like what we see in art or literature, there can be multiple explanations such as implied or inferred meanings which can further enhance our understanding, as opposed to devalue it. A similar comparison can be made from Western medication and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Growing up in an Asian household, I’ve been taught about TCM perspectives like how certain foods have specific properties and should be not consumed together if they are opposites. An example would be to never mix spinach and tofu. This interaction was eventually explained using Western scientific knowledge of how oxalic acids in spinach binds with calcium to form kidney stones. While the latter explanation is much more specific and “precise”, due to our bias of science being holier than anecdotal stories, the TCM lens is still valid and has continued to be valuable over the last few centuries. This helps prove that Western education and AbEd can co-exist together to enhance our and our students’ understanding in “what should be taught”.

Shifting focus to “how things should be taught”, this issue has become even more complex with our current restrictions living under the threat of Covid-19. Traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms pivoted online, and teachers raced to digitize their classroom in order to allow students to continue learning. This led to the realization of how schools are ill-equipped to adapt to the current level of available technology, as issues such as access to devices or even internet connection made it difficult to have a “general” approach to online education. At my school, we already offered blended learning so our students had a mixture of in-person and online classes, and should better adapt to the times. Reality was quite different as I discovered providing avenues for synchronous online meetings to substitute the regular in-person class time and keeping the rest of the class resources, were not adequate as students who performed well previously had started to struggle. I realized in reading Ted Aoki’s (1993) explanation of the “lived-curriculum” and “curriculum-as-planned”, that my current courses were framed largely around the latter aspect. There lacked the personal aspect, also called “lived-curriculum”, which I would provide during in-person classes where the class community would chat about the topic, or off-topic, to help make the content more enjoyable and relatable. This brings us back to the Indigenous perspective of how individual identity being constructed by how they contribute towards the community. My isolated online class did not promote social connections between the students, thus isolating them from each other. Class engagement dropped as a result because they could not see how the material is relevant to them, or had the social outlet to at least collaborate to get through it. While the district believes simply providing generic online courses and resources would solve the issue of physically distanced learning, it fails to recognize those products are purposely created without considering the teacher nor students’ identities. Thus, it is incumbent for the teacher applying the course to recognize this “course-as-planned” and adapt it to also incorporate students’ “lived-curriculum”. In essence, being able understand and plan around “how to teach” and “what to teach”.

To summarize, curriculum has much more depth to what I had originally stated. The Ouroboros appears to have an oversized head and tail, disproportionate to the rest of its body. Yet if I consider the body as the bridge of discourse of details between the two aspects of “what” and “how” to teach, the structure becomes more like the infinity symbol (∞). Each loop would represent one of the aspects and all the considerations necessary within it, but then intersect with the other loop to create a holistic structure overall. Thus, in creating future courses, self-reflection will be paramount as I will need to cross-check whether I have successfully connected both views, and whether one has been emphasized over the other.

 

 

 

 

References:

Aoki, T. (1993). Legitimating lived curriculum: Towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, Spring 1993, Vol. 8, No. 3, 255-268

Blades, D. (1995) Procedures of Power in a Curriculum Discourse: Conversations from Home. JCT, 11(4), 125-155.

Donald, D. (2009). “The Curricular Problem of Indigenousness: Colonial Frontier Logics, Teacher Resistances, and The Acknowledgment of Ethical Space”. In Beyond ‘Presentism’. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Sense. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789460910012_004

Egan, K. (2020). “Learning in Depth in a Franciscan Friary Cell.” www.educationthatinspires.ca/2020/02/06/learning-in-depth-in-a-franciscan-friary-cell/

Nahachewsky, J., & Slomp, D. (2009). “Sound and Fury: Studied Response(S) of Curriculum and Classroom in Digital Times”. In Beyond ‘Presentism’. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Sense. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789460910012_013

Due to the policies established to prevent the spread of Covid-19, traditional brick-and-mortar teaching were forced to pivot to online teaching models. The majority of teachers had to cope with digitizing their resources and learning how to navigate learning management systems (LMS). Teachers teaching at schools that already offer blended or online learning, like myself, continued to utilize pre-built online courses on established LMS, thus can focus on other aspects of online teaching. The direction I decided upon was towards how I could enhance students’ participation in active learning in online environments.

Along with my fellow teachers at our high school, I’ve noticed that students across all subject areas and grade levels were more engaged with the courses during in-person attendance when compared to learning online at home. This issue was further highlighted when we saw students who performed strongly before Covid-19 mandates, begin to slip both in terms of class engagement and academic performance. This discrepancy can be explained using Aoki’s (1993) idea of “curriculum-as-planned” which does not incorporate the “living-curriculum”. While the pre-built courses I use are created by BC Teachers and reflect the new BC Curriculum, they were still designed for “faceless people in a homogenous realm” (Aoki, 1993). When implemented as-is into the classroom, some students would find it difficult to digest the information either due to abstract language or concept, or find it demotivating as they are unable to see how it connects to their lives. Students possess their own living-curriculum” according to Aoki, which is based on their individualities and interests. Previous face-to-face instruction time were successful because I was able to act as the bridge between the two curricula, in order to keep students engaged and motivated. When things moved to being fully online, this connection was disrupted and rarely did the latter curricula present itself. My management of the digital classroom started with good intentions, but ultimately exacerbated the issue of disengagement when students were learning at home.

One of the biggest perceived advantages of online courses is the flexibility of learning anytime and anyplace. Sheail (2018) and Kirkwood (2000) argues against that notion as students have limits in both time and space for which they can participate in online learning. Some challenges include having proper hardware like laptops and a stable internet connection to participate in digital classrooms. Students need to parley with their family on when and who has the highest priority in terms of accessing those resources. With these barriers in mind, I created optional drop-in times for synchronous meetings to avoid conflicting schedules for students and their families. They would interact with course readings and activities asynchronously as before and could ask me through video chat if they needed individual support. Yet this resulted in students becoming isolated in the online classroom. The First Nation’s perspective of societies is that its members see themselves as being “synecdochic rather than more… metonymic (Weaver, 2000)” (Donald, 2009); individual identity is driven by how a person see themselves contribute to community. My methods had accomplished the opposite where students only see and interact with the course content. They were simply another person in a course, like a replaceable cog in a machine. Lack of motivation to engage in the course becomes understandable as they continue to treat the concepts as being abstract, with no cause or effect in their daily lives. If I were to work backwards from the end goal of having students actively engaged in online learning, I need elicit a sense of curiosity or interest in the topic at hand. To do this, I need students to see how the topic connects to our daily lives in some form. Lastly, I can draw upon the collective class community to help students feel connected and share their living-curriculum as a starting point to guide discussions towards course topics.

Reflecting upon my failure in the past school year, my shortcomings have been rationalized through perspectives shown from the literature. Offering freedom to engage in the class asynchronously and the lack of promoting shared community spaces for class use were the most likely reasons for why students did not succeed online. The latter factor will require exploring meaningful, easy-to-use, district-approved tools that allow for both synchronous and asynchronous discussion; and promote its use in the course. The former point will require scaling back the freedom by designating short, but mandatory, meetings times to ensure students are not being isolated in the online classroom. I strongly believe that these two changes will be beneficial in engaging students in active learning online, both during and after this period uncertainty what education will look like going forward.

 

 

References:

Aoki, T. (1993). Legitimating lived curriculum: Towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, Spring 1993, Vol. 8, No. 3, 255-268

Donald, D. (2009). “The Curricular Problem of Indigenousness: Colonial Frontier Logics, Teacher Resistances, and The Acknowledgment of Ethical Space”. In Beyond ‘Presentism’. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Sense. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789460910012_004

Kirkwood, A. (2000). Learning at Home with Information and Communication Technologies. Distance Education, 21(2), 248–259. https://doi.org/10.1080/0158791000210204

Sheail, P. (2018). The Digital University and the Shifting Time–Space of the Campus. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(1), 56–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2017.1387139

To me, curriculum is Art. If one sits there contemplating what it could look like, they will have nothing but empty space to show for. Recognize there is discourse in curriculum design regarding what to teach versus how to teach it. Experiment with it; use different lens and reflect on the results. Seek feedback and consider what improvements can be made. The final product might be a marvelous masterpiece, or it could be an ugly blob – and that is okay. Teachers do not start out perfect, otherwise we would all be at highest salary on the pay scale. We learn from our mistakes and seek ways to improve our practice over time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ouroborous design shown above was specifically chosen in this metaphor because curriculum design feels circular in nature as well. It symbolizes what Egan (2003) touched upon in the history of curriculum discourse where the focus should be on “what should be taught” versus “how it should be taught”. Do I begin with drafting the head or the tail of my snake? Pottle (as cited in in Egan, 2003) cautions that over-contemplation would waste more time than simply doing both. So, let’s take a chance start from the head followed by the body and tail in this piece, which are the contents of a curriculum. The rationale behind it could be as simple as wanting students to be able to distinguish and create different parts of the body. Afterwards, if they wish to create a palindromic creature or repeated array of a single part, that would be perfect and creative extension of the knowledge they have learned. With a clear picture of where the head, body, and tail are, I can then flesh out the details such as the position of parts, the specie being drawn, or perhaps texture of the model. This is the “how” portion of the curriculum. For instance, I could provide students with a blanket circle and ask them to arrange three unique parts within the circle and the connect them. Or, I could provide them with pictures and ask them to sketch or label the parts.

Reflecting on which approach had “better” results becomes easier as you obtain data, be it measured or anecdotal. There should also be student feedback to help direct the goal or process of the curriculum as they are the ones most impacted by it (Blades, 1997).  While us teachers in BC may not have a voice in our curriculum, if the same process occurred for us as it had with Alberta Education then we at least have the autonomy to designate outcomes we want to include or exclude in the classroom.