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Lessons Taught, Lessons Learned Vol. I
SOME THOUGHTS ON
CURRICULUM
by
Marilyn Harmon
Kotzebue
Several years of teaching in
the same grades-and in the lowest ones at that-sometimes cause me
to lose sight of the whole school curriculum. I become quite an
expert in my small area, but I miss the big picture. My experience
could be compared to working in an assembly plant where one takes
the pieces from the manufacturer and starts putting them together
without ever asking what the end product will be.
One way of questioning curriculum
is by asking what do we want to turn out at the end of our time
with this child. My answer to this question would have to be based
on my belief that the individual can make a difference in this
world. Therefore, I would want the curriculum to contribute to
individual students' sense of self-fulfillment, competence in
decision making, and ability to engage in life-long learning. I
believe that education should never limit students, but should
alert them to their options and enable them to make choices.
Therefore, the curriculum should focus on skills in decision
making and on learning skills.
It seems that these educational
goals could be best pursued with an approach to subject matter
similar to that developed by Ron and Suzanne Scollon in "The Axe
Handle Academy" (see this publication). Scollon and Scollon
suggest that subject matter be organized around the following
three areas: bioregional studies, cultural studies, and
communication studies. Within these areas, students would learn to
compare their own world of people and habitat with other worlds,
to be able to better understand others and communicate effectively
with them. This approach to teaching and learning may differ
radically from the traditional subject-centered approach of the
high school. However, it is very similar to what happens in most
of the lower elementary grades. Most of our school day is spent in
language and reading development. There is a strong emphasis on
self-concept, communication and use of the environment. In the
early elementary grades, the traditional subject areas are still
integrated. Only as our students progress through the educational
system does their learning become more and more centered around
distinct subject categories. It could well be that early childhood
education has been offering us a more effective educational model
all along.
An important component of the
curriculum content in rural Alaskan schools has to be the
students' indigenous culture. Sometimes we "outsiders" seem to act
as if this is an unusual idea. However, when I think of my own
education in the Pacific Northwest, I remember that we celebrated
our cultural holidays, that I learned about pioneers and studied
what it would have been like to live long ago. I learned about my
own culture. So why should it seem odd that rural students learn
about berry picking, boating, ice fishing, caribou hunting, and
whaling? We as outsiders may have to set aside some things from
our own culture if they are not appropriate within the life style
of the community. When I taught in an Inuit village in Canada, I
celebrated the community's holidays in the school and cooked
turkey on the holiday. However, I didn't impose my cultural
celebration on the students in my classroom. Obviously, Alaska
celebrates Thanksgiving, but we may find parts of the Western
culture that do not fit into the village life style. The
curriculum of rural schools should reflect the community's
perspectives rather than the educators' background.
So often we educators are setting
ourselves up as the sole and final authority and source of
knowledge, instead of encouraging our students to gather
information from their own environment and to control their own
learning. For far too long, villages have relied on the decisions
of educated outsiders. An unquestioned acceptance of externally
imposed institutions has seemed to prevail. Decision making has
been taken away from rural people by a process in which each
organization has upheld what it knows best. This, of course, is
not solely a problem of Native villages. We in the Western world
often feel at the mercy of doctors, teachers, and politicians as
well. Therefore, students need to learn that education can give
them better decision-making skills, but that it is not infallible
and that it is an ongoing process of lifelong learning. A
process-oriented curriculum, rather than the existing
subject-oriented curriculum, may be more conducive to developing
in the students the skills for thinking and continuous
learning.
Another aspect of the curriculum
is relevance. Each activity, project, or bit of information must
relate to something the student already knows, so there is a
purpose for learning. For example, as educators we may have many
reasons why a first grader should sound out words. However, if the
child does not view this skill as necessary, we are fighting an
uphill battle. Teachers from suburban backgrounds may be
accustomed to children coming from homes in which newspapers lay
around, parents read to their children, and road signs and
billboards are a part of everyday life. These same teachers may
feel overwhelmed when they find that in a rural classr.om, they
must provide a reason for reading by showing their students the
relationship between reading and the world around them. This is
why I chose the community store as a place for my reading unit.
Where else in the village could I find as many words and as many
reasons for reading words? In addition, I found that directions
for toys or food recipes increased my students' interest in
reading. Last year, I passed out a little toy puzzle. A
kindergartner figured it out first because he read the directions
that came with it. He was very excited about his discovery and
spontaneously shared with his peers that he had figured out the
secret by reading. After all, isn't that why we learned to read,
or tie our shoes, or anything else? We saw someone else doing it
and saw value in it for us.
So far, I have pointed out that an
improved curriculum should focus on the process of learning and
incorporate reasons for learning. Now I will have to decide how
this should be accomplished. Every student has a specific way of
learning that best suits him or her. Learning may be approached
primarily through visual or auditory or kinesthetic modes. Most of
us learn best when these approaches are combined, even though we
may lean toward one or the other. I have found that many of my
students in the village tend to do better when using kinesthetic
and visual modes of learning. Therefore, if I rely completely on
an auditory approach, I'm bound to fail and will probably end up
diagnosing my class as "dumb" or "slow." On the other hand, If I
use another learning modality, I may well find reason to judge
those same students as "bright" and "fast."
I am afraid I had to discover this
the hard way. When I taught in a village for the first time, I was
given a certain reading program, which I followed faithfully
instead of analyzing my students' strengths and abilities and
developing an appropriate approach. As a result, all the children
in my class flunked the placement test. As I continued to teach
the program, the same concepts and skills were reinforced 100
times. However, when the students had to apply these concepts and
skills in the achievement tests, everyone failed. At this point, I
began to ask why the students had missed concepts that had been
taught repeatedly. The students had given me the verbal cues
required by the program. However, they had not really learned the
concepts. Gradually I came to understand that the students had not
been able to internalize the concepts because they had not seen
them in different contexts and had not acquired them in a learning
modality suited to their strength.
In another year, I worked
with a different reading series which started out with nursery
rhymes in kindergarten. I tried and tried by using pictures and
saying the rhyme over and over. Nothing I did seemed to work to
get the kids to repeat that four-line poem. I gave up and decided
that it was just too difficult to teach the kids a poem that had
no meaning for them because it was not reinforced by the culture
of. the home. The next year, I happened to sing a rhyme. With
seemingly little effort, the students learned the rhyme and loved
it. After that, I kept increasing the number of rhymes we learned
because I felt that rhymes were a good means for teaching the
students the English language patterns. We ended up working at a
new rhyme almost every week, singing them all, and looking at
related pictures and reading the words. Sometimes, we also did art
projects pertaining to our rhymes. As the year progressed, I asked
what part of school my students liked best. I expected to hear
P.E. or computers or playing in the playhouse, but- the students
invariably referred to the nursery rhymes as a favorite part of
school. These were students from the same background as those I
had so much trouble teaching to read. The only thing that was
different was that I had changed my teaching method.
In situations like this, a project
approach can be very useful because it allows the students to
apply varying learning modalities and pursue different interests
within the same framework. In addition, the goal of wanting to
accomplish the project adds meaning and reason to the students
learning efforts. For a project to be successful, a goal must be
established, information needs to be gathered and organized, and
decisions on what is important to the goal and on how to achieve
it must be made. All of this should be done by the students, with
guidance from the teacher, so that they can develop the learning
and thinking skills that are the main thrust behind our
curriculum.
As has already been pointed out,
the main goal of this curriculum is to enable the students to make
appropriate choices in their adult lives. Society is a complex and
ever changing system, requiring constant adaptation and
decision-making. Again I will try to illustrate this by looking at
how my own educational and cultural background has affected my
life's decisions. What is the normal person doing in my home town?
They are probably married, have 3 to 4 kids, live in families in
which both husband and wife work, and own a ranch-style house with
a station wagon in the driveway. They chose that life style, but I
chose differently by teaching in rural Alaska. Some people back in
my home town have decided that I'm crazy, while others have envied
me. How did I make the decisions that brought me this far? They
were, indeed, influenced by what I learned from my home, my
school, and my community. School gave me information about my
local culture and about the larger communities of my country and
of the world. It provided me with the skills I needed to decide
whether to go out into the "world" immediately after finishing
high school or whether to further my education in college. College
opened my eyes to a greater variety of options and it allowed me
to discover my special interests. Education became one of those
interests.
I first taught school in my own
culture. Then I had an opportunity to teach Inuit people in
Canada. There I learned to appreciate the Eskimo culture and I
chose to live and work among the Inupiaq people. With each of
these decisions, I chose what I wanted out of life. I realize that
I gave up some of the ways of my own culture by living in another.
This is why I feel lost when I hit the smog-filled asphalt streets
and see people hurrying by. However, I feel that I can choose to
hang on to those parts of my culture that I like and let go of
others that I don't value as highly.
I hope that our high school
graduates will be able to choose in much the same way. I hope that
they will be able to decide whether to use their skills in their
own community or elsewhere. And I hope that their education will
enable them to realize their impact on the world and to recognize
the world's place in their lives.
Foreword
J. Kelly Tonsmiere
Introduction
Ray Barnhardt
Section
I
Some Thoughts on Village
Schooling
"Appropriate
Schools in Rural Alaska"
Todd Bergman, New Stuyahok
"Learning
Through Experience"
Judy Hoeldt, Kaltag
"The
Medium Is The Message For Village
Schools"
Steve Byrd, Wainwright
"Multiple
Intelligences: A Community Learning
Campaign"
Raymond Stein, Sitka
"Obstacles
To A Community-Based Curriculum"
Jim Vait, Eek
"Building
the Dream House"
Mary Moses-Marks, McGrath
"Community
Participation in Rural Education"
George Olana, Shishmaref
"Secondary
Education in Rural Alaska"
Pennee Reinhart, Kiana
"Reflections
on Teaching in the Kuskokwim Delta"
Christine Anderson, Kasigluk
"Some
Thoughts on Curriculum"
Marilyn Harmon, Kotzebue
Section
II
Some Suggestions for the
Curriculum
"Rabbit
Snaring and Language Arts"
Judy Hoeldt, Kaltag
"A Senior
Research Project for Rural High Schools"
Dave Ringle, St. Mary's
"Curriculum
Projects for the Pacific Region,"
Roberta Hogue Davis, College
"Resources
for Exploring Japan's Cultural Heritage"
Raymond Stein, Sitka
"Alaskans
Experience Japanese Culture Through
Music"
Rosemary Branham, Kenai
Section
III
Some Alternative
Perspectives
"The
Axe Handle Academy: A Proposal for a Bioregional, Thematic
Humanities Education"
Ron and Suzanne Scollon
"Culture,
Community and the Curriculum"
Ray Barnhardt
"The
Development of an Integrated Bilingual and Cross-Cultural
Curriculum in an Arctic School District"
Helen Roberts
"Weaving
Curriculum Webs: The Structure of Nonlinear
Curriculum"
Rebecca Corwin, George E. Hem and Diane Levin
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Last
modified
August 14, 2006
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