ON THE LEFT END

On the spectrum of potential approaches to curriculum, farthest from the technical end of the continuum lies the reconceptualist approach.  It is so far down that conceptual road that some curricular scholars don’t consider it an approach at all.  But for our purposes, it is.  Other scholars, according to Ornstein and Hunkins,[1] view it as an extension of the humanistic approach.  The reason some curricular experts dismiss this approach lies mostly in the fact that it does not address curricular development issues; it’s solely into content.  The curricular workers who adopt it shy away from technical matters associated with development.  Initially, then, this approach engenders some controversy.

The argument that holds it to be an approach has been based on the claim that it addresses the social, economic, and political aspects of education – not just curriculum – and its focus is not limited to schools, but all of society.  As such, its advocates emulate those who follow the academic approach in that they concentrate their subject on the abstract and shun the more practical side of curricular work.  This steers their attention away from curricular development, per se.  The effect for those who toil in the fields of education, away from the halls of academia, is that they are prone to see such study as impractical.  Their challenges are to design, maintain, and evaluate curricular components at actual school sites, not to ponder the social conditions of the day.  But to those who do deal in theory, the contributions of the reconceptualists are much appreciated, especially among other reconceptualists.  Hence, there is a divide in the education world between practitioners and theorists – a divide, I might add, not limited to the affairs of education.

But reconceptualists do have their supporters among the practicing minions.  They tend to take a postmodern perspective when going about their jobs.  They argue that curricular work demands a new consciousness.  To them, there is no one way to view curriculum development and they, along with their fellow practitioners, need to embrace a more open and interactive perspective.  They tend to emphasize that development should be the product of communal efforts, not limited to the work of specialists.  And here we encounter our initial aim in this review of approaches; that is, curriculum work should be transformed from what it generally tends to be.  Those other approaches, reviewed over the last five postings, are to varying degrees more technical.  Instead of striving for well-managed processes in which the authorized specialists run through their preconceived processes and logical sequential steps – a favorite target here is Tyler’s model of curriculum development previously described under my treatment of the behavioral approach – curriculum workers should not only allow, but also encourage chaos.  More specifically, they should invite all the stakeholders – students, parents, teachers, administrators, other members of the community, academia, etc. – into the process and let them thrash out a strategic plan for a school.  The postmodern eye looks for open systems, not closed ones; it appreciates inclusiveness and representation, not special expertise that always seems to have hidden agendas.  For many, this will seem uncomfortable and reconceptualists would recommend that such discomfort emanates from limited mindsets.  Some might add that these are mindsets springing from interests not necessarily limited to the concerns of educating youth in the most viable, productive way and in the interests of the students and of the community.

And this leads one to that segment of reconceptualist thought that tends toward the political.  For these pedagogues, the aim is emancipation from the norms, conceptualizations, and ruling interests that are in place to protect the powerful, be they in an economic, political, or any other realm of authority, such as the spiritual.  This calls not only for change, but for transformative change.  Oppressive power relations are not just a matter of brute authoritarian controls, but also of subtle sociological and psychological controls.  Those in power control the mechanisms of socialization and with them, the modes of communicating what the powerful deem to be prudent and moral.  To break such control from cases that are overt to cases that are tacit and shrouded, emancipating education has to be transformative; that is, not only changing what is known and believed by students, but what they end up believing should be.  The assumption among reconceptualists is that what exists in our schools mirrors what exists in our society:  a static and oppressive reality.  Want to hear an expression of this view?  Review the rhetoric of the Bernie Sanders’ candidacy for president.  Such a review will give you a sense of what it would be like to feel the “Bern” in terms of running our schools.

Pioneers in this tradition were George S. Counts, Harold O. Rugg, and Harold Benjamin.  They started curricular work that among their followers has been noted for their more emotionally charged arguments.  These arguments have been organized and they compose a fairly discernable ideology – to varying degrees, among its adherents, following the ideas of Karl Marx – and, as such, the ideology attacks inequality and discrimination based on class, gender, race, religion, nationality, age, and sexual preferences.  The adherents target what they see and define as miseducation and oppression.  To their critics, many reconceptualists suffer from myopia in that they oversimplify and overgeneralize oppressive aspects of any society and underappreciate meaningful policies that address them.

In terms of change, there is a lot to derive from the reconceptualists.  Their call for transformational change is welcome.  Along with this type of change, their call for inclusion is seen as supportive of the efforts many change agents exert.  It should be pointed out, though, that not all curricular workers who call for transformational change are reconceptualists.  One can say that reconceptualists are transformational change advocates with an attitude.  This might be overstating the case a bit, but one can detect this strident tendency when one attends their gatherings and listens to their speakers.  Of course, one should not over generalize or dismiss what reconceptualists have to offer due to the belligerence of some (many) of their spokespersons and followers.  In terms of finding reconceptualists in your local school, perhaps you will find one or two of them holding teaching positions, but do not be surprised if you do not find any.

This ends my review of the educational approaches Ornstein and Hunkins offer.  The approaches have been the behavioral, the managerial, the systems, the academic, the humanist, and the reconceptualist approaches.  This one and the last five postings have provided a description of each of them.  The aim is to arm potential change agents with a bit of knowledge as to the potential, curricular biases among educators they might encounter at the school site or the district office.

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[1]  Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

THE ELUSIVE “AUNTIE MAME” FACTOR

In my current review of the various approaches to curriculum,[1] with the last approach, the academic, you might have sensed a shift from the previous three approaches.  That is, the academic, with its philosophic bent, is quite a bit less technical than the three approaches that preceded it:  the behavioral, managerial, and the systems approaches.  With this posting, I will describe an approach that is the most artistic of them all, the humanistic.  As such, this approach can be considered the least rigid and technocratic.  Here, the attempt is one in which there is a much higher level of concern with what is personal and with how the person interacts socially.  The approach is more of a reaction to what its proponents see as curriculum workers neglecting the artistic and cultural elements that a sound curriculum should not only encompass, but upon which it should focus.  By so doing, those involved, from curriculum worker to student, can address the need to be self-reflective and to progress toward self-actualization.  In order to do this, this approach takes into account, to a much more heightened level, the socio-psychological environment of the classroom and of the school in which the curriculum is to function.

As with many of the approaches considered, this one has its origins in the work of John Dewey and his days at the University of Chicago.  There, the works of Charles Judd and Francis Parker are of note.  It gained impetus when Dewey moved to the Teachers College at Columbia University.  Other names associated with this approach at Columbia include Frederick Bosner, Hollis Caswell, L. Thomas Hopkins, William Kilpatrick, and Harold Rugg.  The stretch of time between the development in Chicago to New York stretched from the 1920s to the 1950s.  The later years were influenced by advancements in child psychology and humanistic psychology.  Insights into ego, valuing, mental health, and personal growth and fulfillment were incorporated into the work of these educators.

Probably the area of pedagogy most affected by the developments of these curricular workers was in elementary education.  Such instructional techniques as group games, artistic endeavors, and field trips were devised with the overall aim of having students engage in life simulating activities and activities that reflected socially dynamic aspects of learning such as creative problem solving and active participation within, when possible, school-wide or even community settings.  All of this had a strong dose of progressive thinking behind it.

There was a strong input from developmental psychologists Robert J. Havighurst, Erik Erikson, and Abraham Maslow.  Child-centered instructional innovations by German educator Frederick Foebel, Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Scottish educator A. S. Neill were incorporated.  In addition, what I believe to be a very important development was the attention these educators brought to what was labeled the informal and hidden curriculum – those aspects of schooling that are not identified or necessarily addressed by the other approaches.  To cite a simple example, this approach looks at the effect of having those bells ringing every hour or so to indicate the “learning” period either beginning or ending.  How do such practices define what we consider education to be and, in turn, how artificial is that definition?  As part of this new viewpoint, educators were encouraged to take into account the whole child – emotions as well as cognitive and behavioral factors – in how and why a child is educated.  This added such areas of concern as music, health education, literature, and the other humanities to the content and were considered just as important as the STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and math.

From all of this work, various instructional practices were added to the repertoire of teachers.  These included cooperative learning, small-group learning and other practices that emphasized more of the cooperative rather than the competitive nature of learning.  It also strongly suggested that curriculum planning and implementation take on a more social character where parents and other community representatives could be included.  There should be, according to the proponents, more collegiality and mentoring going on at the schoolhouse and, in turn, participation should be considered a duty by other members of the community.  The addition of curriculum committees would promote a more bottom up view as opposed to the managerial perspective of a top down approach to curriculum development and implementation.  This whole perspective probably hit its apogee during the 1970s.  But it is my impression that while a lot of this is given lip service, with mandatory committees being instituted, the whole approach never took much of a hold as its proponents hoped.  While a faculty of any size would probably have one or two teachers – the creative ones – the bulk of instruction in that school does not follow the humanistic approach.  The missing element is the necessary transformational change such a dynamic and all-encompassing shift demands.  That is, to fully implement these ideas, teachers, administrators, parents, students, and other community members have to have an emotional commitment that is simply not there, at least not to the degree that one would need in order to secure the displacement of what I believe is prominent in our schools – the managerial approach.  Perhaps such a change is unrealistic and utopian, but I do believe our schools can more meaningfully apply what this approach strives to implement.  What seems to be missing is a more realistic view of what change encompasses – hence, the need for more well-informed and skilled change agents.

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[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.