Curriculum Metaphors
There are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird? How about two ways of looking at a school curriculum?
What Are We Doing?
What is it we’re trying to do with children in our classrooms, day after day, year after year? What is the plan or structure or script that guides us, that tells us what to do next Wednesday and why we shouldn’t do it on Tuesday?
That plan or structure is what we call a curriculum. It’s not the same thing as a textbook. A chapter of a book isn’t the same thing as an hour of time in a room. You can use a textbook as a tool within your curriculum. You can offload your thinking and just read the textbook, page by page, as your curriculum. But the one thing is not the other. Or, at least, it doesn’t have to be.
A curriculum is not the same thing as a set of standards. A standard is a goal to achieve or a marker to measure people against. Five kilometers is a goal for a footrace. Five kilometers in 30 minutes could be a standard to measure yourself against. Neither number has anything to say about the how or why of it all.
Is a curriculum a calendar of daily or weekly topics to address? A menu of instructional options to draw upon? A mandated script to follow? It could be any of those things—and too often, it ends up being loathed and complained about and strategically ignored in whatever format is presented to (or forced upon) teachers. Teachers generally prefer to create their own curriculum, though many of them are left to do with no real training.
What could curriculum be, in a way that’s useful and meaningful to teachers and students?
Curriculum Could Be a Story
A curriculum is often thought of as simply a linear to-do list or calendar of things-to-cover and when-to-cover-them. It’s one damned thing after another. Perhaps it was constructed with some deep thinking and intentionality, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be implemented and delivered that way—especially if it’s not your thing. If you didn’t make the plan, it’s hard to deliver it with all the passion and meaningfulness its creators intended.
A story is a whole ‘nother thing. A story isn’t simply a set of items strung together in a particular order; it’s a set of items strung together in an inexorable order that drives to an inescapable conclusion. It’s not a list; it’s a ride.
What’s the first thing you do when you get on a ride? You strap yourself in. Why? Because you don’t know what’s about to happen, but you know something is about to happen, and you need to be ready for it. Anticipation gets your heart beating faster.
Think about this famous opening scene from a beloved movie:
Cast your mind back to the first time you saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. What is going through your mind at this moment? You don’t know who this man is, but you know he’s some kind of adventurer and he seems to be in charge. You don’t know what he’s doing, but you sense it’s risky and you can tell he has some kind of plan. You have to watch closely to figure out what’s going on.
However…you’re not completely in the dark. You’ve been given enough information to get you intrigued and curious, to wonder what’s going to happen next. Your heart is beating faster not because of a manufactured jump scare, but because of deliberately crafted anticipation. You are bought in and ready for the ride.
Good stories hold our attention because we don’t know what’s going to happen next, but we know enough to care about what’s going to happen next.
What makes us care?
We care when we’re invested in a character—when we identify with someone who is just like us, or perhaps when we have empathy for someone who is not like us, but in whose place we could imagine ourselves.
We care when we get engaged in the storyline. We’re interested in where we are. We’re curious about where we’re going. We’re in suspense about how we’re going to get there and what it’s going to take. We want to see how it all turns out. We’re invested.
Tell Me Why I Should Care
When any of these things come into play in an academic course, you don’t have to work hard to engage and motivate students. When these things are absent, it’s an uphill battle. But how often are creators of curriculum even thinking about these things?
When we think about student interest and investment in course content, we should be able to answer these questions for our students, even if they don’t know enough to ask them explicitly:
What is it about the discipline as a whole that should speak to me?
What is it about the subject matter in the course that should speak to me?
What do you have that I need?
Why is it important that I care about this information?
What’s the Big Payoff if I hang in till the end?
When we think about personal connection and empathy with the themes and ideas of the course overall, we should be able to answer these questions for our students, even if they don’t know enough to ask them explicitly:
In what ways will this course connect me to a larger world?
What do I need to understand about that world?
How might my understanding change the way I think about things?
How might my understanding change the way I think about myself?
What is at stake if I do not change?
How often do we think about questions like these in relation to our kids and our courses? What is at stake for us as educators if we don’t think about them?
Curriculum is Also a House
Curriculum is a story that you unwind over the course of a semester or a year, but it’s also a place—it’s a room you build for students to live in and wander around in and explore. How do you shape the space, both physical and psychic, to create the experience you want to create?
Architecture can influence experience. Sitting in a cathedral is not like sitting in a bus station. One is built deliberately to shape your feelings, to draw your reflection forward to the altar and up to the sky. The other is built simply to house your body until it can be shepherded onto a bus and out of town.
Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect who thought a lot about how space can influence feeling. Visit his Taliesin West compound in Arizona, and you can experience it for yourself. When you tour the main building, you are led from a room with low, slanted ceilings through a low, tight doorway and into a large, open room. You are squeezed and then released. It’s all done deliberately to create a feeling of awe and expansiveness when you enter the big room. The rooms, and how you move through them, shape how you feel.
How often do we think about the architecture of our instruction—how we shape time and space to create learning experiences—and not just once, generically, but differently throughout the year in order to achieve different, specific ends that align with our instructional goals? What, in our curriculum, is a load-bearing wall? What can we knock down and move?
Those questions matter a great deal when a curriculum is given to us to implement. Is every last part of it mandatory? Is it a script we must follow? Or is there a shape and a flow built for us to work inside of, with room to maneuver and improvise and differentiate to accommodate our teaching styles, our interests, and the realities of a particular set of children?
The Space Where Love Comes In
Whichever metaphor you prefer, teaching has a rhythm and a vibe and a feeling, all of which matter greatly. Those things are not incidental to the discrete facts and skills listed for us to teach; they are the how and the why of our teaching and of our students’ learning, and both require some room for people to breathe and react.
A story needs readers or viewers to interpret and react to it, and they get to react and respond however they choose. The story has an intention behind it, but the receivers are also participants. They get to make the story their own.
They have to make the story their own. If they don’t, it won’t matter.
A sanctuary can suggest the direction of prayers or thoughts, but it can’t mandate the response. It has to leave room for people to sit in silence, or to listen to a choir, and to have an experience with something larger than themselves, that they are a part of.
This is why scripts and mandates fail. They don’t leave room for love.
The love we have for teaching our subjects, and the love we want our students to feel for learning about the world around them—and for the world itself and the people and things in it—that love has to be baked into the way we present things to our students and the way we want them to encounter and play with and think about those things. Love and care and curiosity are not magical byproducts of a textbook or a pacing plan. It’s up to us to dig into those requirements and shape them into a story that engages young people’s curiosity and empathy, or into a temple that shapes and channels their dreams and aspirations.
There is so much more to do than turn to Chapter Seven.