Teachers, Leaders, and Schools: Essays by John Dewey

Introduction: The School Curriculum

65 Introduction: The School Curriculum MANY EDUCATORS CONSIDER THE SCHOOL curriculum to be one area that is immediately pertinent to what they do. This perception is easily appreciated , especially when we understand that curriculum is defined in many, diverse, and sometimes overlapping ways. For example, curriculum may be seen as the formal or official subject matter of a class, school, or district; the unofficial lessons that are taught by a school culture; the planned or unplanned activities of a person or agency; a story as approached in a classroom; a set of publications in someone’s office; the mainly hidden, structural, organizational, and policyrelated characteristics and qualities of a school or district; and the assessment instruments of a school, district, or governmental agency. And there are many other definitions, such as the passions and thinking of the teacher; the life stories that students bring to school; the desirable and undesirable encroaching and interrupting ideas and feelings of students; all of the experiences that students have in a school, planned and otherwise. If we wish to move beyond school definitions of curriculum, some suggest, then the curriculum ought to be seen as including every extraschool lesson conveyed by a dynamic society’s sanctioned and unsanctioned influences and entities. As we might imagine, Dewey’s understanding of curriculum was complex, many-sided, and multilayered and included, at least obliquely, most of the meanings if not in the same terms noted above. At a minimum, however, he infused the idea of curriculum with his conceptions of experience and inquiry, experience being that ongoing transaction or interaction that one has with and within any environment, and inquiry being the ability to evaluate those interactions and transactions by employing every available source of knowledge and understanding. Inquiry is also a method of questioning, digging, involving curiosity and reflection and may embody an aesthetic character. Consequently, he believed curriculum included, but went far beyond, the more formal/explicit 66 The School Curriculum concepts of textbooks, goals, objectives, and standards and the spheres of inquiry and creativity. While he was attentive to the social, psychological, and cultural development of students and the shaping of their likes and dislikes, or interests, into purposes, he observed in Experience and Education (LW13) that students’ interests, linked to their experiences and reflective and imaginative realms of inquiry, should be guided by teachers toward warranted assertions, democratic values, meaning construction, and aesthetic satisfaction. Teachers should also guide students from an elementary understanding of their worlds toward adult or mature conceptions, developing minds that are sufficiently informed to learn about and grapple with social, economic, and political questions. In view of these emphases, it was important to Dewey that the school curriculum be connected to past and current experiences and inquiries of students. This grounding does not ignore but builds on the rudiments of reading, writing, and mathematics. This foundation leads to future attempts to connect content to the world of the students and to their future lives. For Dewey, in one sense, subject matter is accumulated human experience, implying it is tied to both culture and community and cannot be defined simplistically by reference to disciplinary boundaries, such as chemistry, music, English, history, and art. He criticized the traditional curriculum of his time that centered itself in teacher and textbook, which by ignoring the connection between knowing and experience , too often became remote and alienating to the student. He promoted a curriculum that would excite and engage students, that pushed them to imagine, reflect, create, and inquire. Through this engagement, students were to learn more than information and facts, but how to analyze and solve problems in an intelligent fashion and, thereby, form the broader traits of a democratic citizen. Toward this end (an educated, democratic citizen), he recognized that the teacher and students possess and manifest valuable qualities and in an important sense are also curricula, reflecting to varying degrees the qualities or lessons of thinkers, problem solvers, judges, and democratic citizens (MW1; MW9; MW15). They—and others—contributed to what he labeled the collateral curriculum of attitudes, preferences, and ways of thinking (LW13). Beyond the school, he saw other collateral curricula extending even farther into the community and beyond. Probably more than any other educational theorist, Dewey stressed the potential of all types of entities—schools, banks, businesses, homes, industries, government bureaus, private agencies, and religious organizations —to be educative forces in the shaping of a genuinely reflective person and democratic society. For teachers, it is critical to understand and...