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Lessons Taught, Lessons Learned Vol. I
WEAVING CURRICULUM WEBS:
THE STRUCTURE OF
NONLINEAR CURRICULUM
by
Rebecca Corwin
George E. Hein
Diane Levin
Graduate School of
Education
Lesley College
Cambridge, Massachusetts
This article was originally
published in Childhood
Education, March,
1976.
Described in a story by Doris
Lessing is a fabulously fertile African garden, "...rich chocolate
earth studded with emerald green, frothed with the white of
cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the
scarlet wealth of tomatoes. Around the fence grew lemons, pawpaws,
bananas-shapes of gold and yellow in their patterns of
green."* But the garden is a failure for the London woman
who planted it. It does not conform to her sense of what a proper English
garden
should be.
All of us are limited by our
background and experiences; we have difficulty in recognizing the
value of pieces of the world that are unfamiliar to us. The things
we grew up with, what we expect, are understood and appreciated;
the strange new sights-whether a garden full of exotic fruits or a
classroom full of diverse activities-present problems. No matter
how robust and vital the experience, we need to restructure our
thinking and our expectations in order to appreciate new
events.
Traditional descriptions of
curricula are tidy and tended. Usually they are linear: a lesson
consists of presenting an idea, learning about it and summing up
the relevant concepts. But a curriculum need not be familiar in
this way. Consider the following events:
One day Susan, a third-grader,
brings a spider to school and shows it to her classmates during
class meeting. The teacher and children ask many questions: Where
did she find it? How did she catch it? Has she fed it? What does
she plan to do with it? The teacher suggest the children build a
cage for the spider. What does a spider "home" need? Three
children volunteer to go to the school library to get books that
will help them learn more about spiders and how they live.
Meanwhile two children discuss getting food for the spider and two
others consider what the spider should be called. One child
recounts the experience of watching a spider spin a web. Before
the meeting ends, the teacher makes a list of the questions that
have been raised and of some suggested activities. The children
list their names beside the activity on which they plan to begin
work.
A visitor walking into this room
later in the day sees three children sitting near the spider with
a book open, trying to identify what kind of spider it is. They
are discussing its color, number of legs, eyes, body parts and
size. They get a magnifying glass to observe their spider more
carefully. On the basis of their reading, they draw several
conclusions: "This kind lives only in Africa so it can't be that."
"These are poisonous and we know ours is safe." "Ours is too big
to be that kind."
Three children get a box, cut out
one side and cover it with clear plastic to make a spider house.
They discuss how to make air holes so the spider can breathe. One
child says she has a piece of fine screening at home and offers to
bring it to school. She thinks the holes are small enough so the
spider cannot get through, but they will have to check to be sure.
Two other children return from the playground where they have
gotten a few twigs to put in the box so the spider will have a
place to build a web. After a hard search, three others have
managed to catch a few bugs to try feeding the spider. They plan
to watch to see what happens when they put the bugs in with the
spider. The teacher comes over with a homemade book and suggests
recording the results so they will know what to catch tomorrow.
One writes a title, "What Spiders Eat," on the front.
Two weeks later, when the visitor
returns, the spider's home is completed. Matted on construction
paper and carefully displayed are two poems about the web the
spider has spun. A child has "spun" a web, too, by weaving on a
circular loom and has written an account of how difficult it was
to make the weaving as well as the spider did its spinning. Other
children have made "books," which contain stories they have
written and illustrated, including one about a monster" spider.
One book tells about the kinds and quantities of food the spider
ate. A chart shows whose turn it is to find food and feed the
spider. Someone has written about the size of the web and how long
it took to be built. One group has begun collecting ants and has
made an ant farm.
The many activities in this
classroom do not directly relate to our usual notions of
curriculum. How can we keep track of learnings that occur in such
an apparent hodge-podge? One way of recording curriculum
information is called a flow chart or flow tree
. The previously described
spider activities might appear as in Figure 1.
Figure 1
click on image for a
bigger view
A more formal, traditional
approach to a curriculum might, in contrast, present spiders as
part of a science unit in a linear way.
|
SPIDER
|
-CHARACTERISTICS OF
SPIDERS
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-IDENTIFICATION OF
SPIDERS
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-KINDS OF
SPIDERS
|
-CLASSIFICATION OF
ANIMALS
|
This more familiar design,
starting with an experience intended to lead to a specific goal,
represents a totally different approach to curriculum and learning
from the detailed example given above. It is helpful to contrast
and compare the two ways of organizing.
In a traditional approach to
knowledge, problems about the coverage of skills areas do not
arise seriously in any theoretical way. The teacher, or curriculum
developer, decides what subjects or concepts the class or group is
to cover and then arranges the information in what is considered
the most appropriate sequence. The experiences illustrate the
concepts but do not determine the curriculum.
Informal or "open education" approaches consider the acquisition of skills
quite differently. Because there is no predetermined order to and coverage
of
material, it is often assumed incorrectly that informal education
advocates have no concern for skills. Such unstructured classrooms
might be a joy for lazy teachers, but they certainly do not
reflect a real sense of open education. Teachers who support open
education would argue that there are indeed skills they want to
impart: they acknowledge the importance of children's learning to
read, to compute and to understand the world. But they believe
that because individual children learn in a variety of ways, with
different children learning different things from the same
experience, a new classroom organization and a less linear
curriculum are required.
When a teacher surrenders the
support of the predetermined structure of knowledge, as reflected
in a formal curriculum, he or she takes on the difficult job of
developing an overall structure in which children's individual
paths can flourish through learning activities. Curriculum
trees or flow charts are not just nice decorations or a rationale
for lack of structure. They are an alternative way of organizing
experiences of the world and provide both a guide and a challenge
for the teacher.
If we accept the idea that
children have individual learning styles and that they go through
horizontal and nonlinear growth periods of different intensity and
duration, then we must also accept the view that we cannot cut up
the day in neat segments and decide what will be learned in each.
We need to encourage and facilitate individual children's
development. We also need to think about the class as a group and
what its needs are, providing for both small- and whole-group
activities.
In this new kind of structure,
then, Sarah and Johnny are not asked to engage in the same
activity minute by minute. Instead, their leamings over periods of
weeks and months are the central concern. An open education
teacher does not see knowledge as cut up into little bits but does
have long-term goals and clear ideas about the child's need to
learn through interaction with the world. The teacher can explain
the learning taking place during different activities by
references to examples of a specific child's work and can also
document the learning that has gone on over a period of
time.
Interactions with the real world
through materials, rather than mediated time chunks, tend
therefore to determine curriculum in informal classrooms. This
quite radical ("back to roots") idea is, indeed, a restructuring
of curricular organization that is different from the "usual." The
affluence of the late sixties encouraged many school systems to
invest heavily in materials and games, and many classrooms are now
equipped with a variety of attractive materials. These materials
usually are used only as a supplement to the traditional program,
however, rather than as a potentially vital experience in
themselves. Often they are employed to entertain the children
while the teacher works with one or another group. A philosophical
shift is needed. When a teacher better understands the central
position of materials in learning and the non-linear nature of
learning, then he or she can act on that understanding by becoming
familiar with materials and by working with the children through
them.
The teacher's role is crucial in
structuring the nonlinear curriculum. It involves the ability to
respond to children's interests as they arise and to respect their
seriousness of purpose by providing for extensions of the
immediate learning situation. The teacher in the example of the
spider asked specific questions in order to promote discussion
skills, provided a framework of plans and activities for children
to follow, and helped children decide what they wanted to learn
and how to go about it, providing books and materials as needed.
She couldn't plan everything in advance but instead supported
children's interests and skills, making educated guesses about
what would most likely spark children's imagination.
What are the implications of
this type of teacher role? What underlies the teacher's image of
his or her job? To sum up, such a teacher believes that children
learn best:
- Through their individual
interests and strengths.
- Through active, concrete
experiences with materials and ideas.
- By interdisciplinary synthesis
of usual subject areas; not all learning can be broken into
boxes or into sequences.
- By experimentation-watching,
trying, adjusting, exploring ideas until they "jell."
- Via a wide range of horizontal
experiences (those that are at the same competency
level). Repetitive though such experiences may seem, once is
often not enough for mastery. At the same time, however, the
teacher provides vertical
experiences that may move the child onward in terms of
competency level. A balance of these components is
sought.
These notions of the teacher's role
and their relation to views about children's learning are different
from the traditional structure of schools and curriculum. But, like
the succulent fruit of the African garden, they represent the product
of another tradition; they come from a long history of observing
children in action in the real world.
Despite recent talk about "backlash" against open education, thoughtful implementation
of informal
approaches is beginning to occur throughout the United States and
Canada. A number of schools are developing classrooms where slow,
steady examination of curriculum decisions is leading to curriculum
changes for children. To establish a successful classroom of this
kind takes a lot of hard work and also confidence that a different
view of curriculum and knowledge can help children to grow and learn.
To alter curricula is not enough: rather, the entire view of what
things might constitute appropriate support for the nonlinear
curriculum must be adjusted-as happened when a spider went to
school.
*From African
Stories by Doris Lessing.
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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