Seven Curriculum Mind Shifts Part 1

 

What follows are descriptions of mind shifts toward a more quantum conception of curriculum. From Transmitting Meaning to Constructing Meaning Merlin Wittrock, From Episodic, Compartmentalized Subjects to Trans-disciplinary Learning, From Knowing Right Answers to Knowing How to Behave When Answers Are Not Readily Apparent Schools, From Uniformity to Diversity, From External Evaluation to Self- Assessment Evaluation, From Episodic to Continual Learning, From Motivation to Liberation.

 

From Transmitting Meaning to Constructing Meaning Merlin Wittrock (1986).

Reminds us that the brain's capacity and desire to make or elicit patterns of meaning is one of the keys of brain-based learning. We never really understand something until we can create a model or metaphor derived from our unique personal world. The reality we perceive, feel, see, and hear is influenced by the constructive processes of the brain as well as by the cues that impinge upon it.

 

Meaning making is not a spectator sport.
Knowledge is a constructive process rather Humans don't get than a finding. It is not the content stored in ideas; they make memory but the activity of constructing it that idea gets stored. Humans don't get ideas; they make ideas.

Meaning making is not just an individual operation. The individual interacts with others to construct shared knowledge. There is a cycle of internalization of what is socially constructed as shared meaning, which is then externalized to affect the learner's social participation. Constructivist learning, therefore, is viewed as a reciprocal process in that the individual influences the group and the group influences the individual (Vygotsky 1978).

Our perceptions of learning need to shift from educational outcomes that are primarily an individual's collections of subskills to include successful participation in socially organized activities and the development of students' identities as conscious, flexible, efficacious and interdependent meaning makers. We must let go of having learners acquire our meanings and have faith in the processes of individuals' construction of their own and shared meanings through social interaction. That's scary because the individual and the group may not construct the meaning we want them to—a real challenge to the basic educational framework with which most schools are comfortable.

 

From Episodic, Compartmentalized Subjects to Trans-disciplinary Learning.

 


There is an underlying unity one that would encompass not just physics and chemistry, but biology, information processing, economics, political science, and every other aspect of human affairs. If this unity were real... it would be a way of knowing the world that made little distinction between biological science, physical science—or between cither of those sciences and history or philosophy. Once, the whole intellectual fabric was seamless. And maybe it could be that way again. (Cowan, as quoted in Waldrop 1992, p. 67).

Over 350 years ago, Renee Descartes classified knowledge into discrete compartments. He separated algebra from the study of geometry, distinguished meteorology from astronomy, and initiated the concept of hematology.

We are still operating, under this obsolescent rubric, the organization of curriculum into these static compartments while a helpful classification system for allocating time, hiring and training teachers, managing testing, and purchasing textbooks or organizing university departments has probably produced more problems than benefits. Organizing curriculum around the disciplines limits teachers of different departments, grade levels, and disciplines from meeting together, communicating about and finding connections and continuities among students' learning’s.

Certain disciplines are perceived to be of more worth than others. Through credit requirements, time allotments, allocation of resources, national, state and local mandates, standards, testing, etc., schools send alert messages to students and the community concerning which subjects are of greater worth. This fractionalization across departments results in incongruent goals among the different people involved.

 

The disciplines, as we have known them, may no longer exist. With the advent of increased technology and the pursuit of knowledge in all quarters of human endeavor, the separate disciplines are being replaced by human activities that draw upon vast, generalized, and trans-disciplinary bodies of knowledge and relationships applied to unique, domain-specific settings. To be an urcheologist today, for example, requires employment of radar and distant satellite infrared photography as well as understanding of radioactive isotopes. Professions have combined multiple disciplines into unique and eversmaller specialties: Space-biology, genetic-technology, neuro-chemistry, astrohydrology.

 

What distinguishes the disciplines may be their modes of inquiry. Each content has a logic that is defined by the thinking that produced it: its purposes, problems, information, inferences, concepts, assumptions, implications, points of view, forms of communication, technology and its interrelationships meaning for physical with other disciplines. What makes a discipline education, which has a discipline, is a disciplined mode of thinking no application to (Paul and Elder 1994). The terms—biology, literature and has anthropology, psychology, and cosmology. Thus, biology is the logic of the study of life forms. Psycho-logy is the logic of the study of the mind, etc. All areas of study are topics of interest in which something has to be reasoned out. Mathematics means being able to figure out a solution to a problem using mathematical reasoning. Any discipline must, therefore, be understood as a mode of figuring out correct or reasonable solutions to a certain range of problems.

The disciplines deter transfer. Knowledge, as traditionally taught and tested in school subjects, often consists of a mass of knowledge-level content that is not understood deeply enough to enable a student to think critically in the subject and to seek and find relationships with other subjects. Immersion in a discipline will not necessarily produce learners who have the ability to transfer the concepts and principles of the discipline into everyday life situations. Students acquire the idea that they learn something for the purpose of passing the test, rather than accumulating wisdom and personal meaning from the content.

 

The separations of the disciplines produce episodic, compartmentalized and encapsulated thinking in students. When the biology teachers says, "Today we're going to learn to spell some biological terms," students often respond by saying, "Spelling in biology? No way!" Biology has little meaning for physical education, which has no application to literature and has even less connection to algebra. They may be viewed as a series of subjects to be mastered rather than habituating the search for meaningful relationships and the application of knowledge beyond the context in which it was learned.

 

The disciplines, presented as separate organized bodies of content, may deceive students into thinking they are incapable of constructing meaning. Students frequently have been indirectly taught that they lack the means to create, construct, connect, and classify knowledge. They are life in the real-taught that organized theories, generalizations, world ... demands and concepts of a particular discipline of multiple ways to do knowledge are the polished products created something well by expert minds far removed from them. Thus students may think they are incapable of generating such information for themselves.

 

While students are challenged to learn the information, the manner in which such information was created and classified often remains mysterious. All they can hope for is to acquire other peoples' meanings and answers to questions that someone else deems important.

 

We need students to transfer and apply their knowledge from one situation to another, to draw forth from their storehouses of knowledge, and 10 apply knowledge in new and novel situations. The curriculum should capitalize on the natural interdependency and interrelatedness of knowledge.

 

We need, therefore, to put together teams of teachers who have been artificially separated by their departments and to redefine their task from teaching their isolated content to instead, develop multiple intellectual capacities of students. Peter Senge (1997) contends that we are all natural systems thinkers and the findings in cognitive research are compatible and supportive of the need to move from individual to collective intelligence, from disciplines to themes, from independence to relationships.

 

 

Tags:
Comments
Add New Search RSS
Write comment
Name:
Email:
 
Title:
 
Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

!joomlacomment 4.0 Copyright (C) 2009 Compojoom.com . All rights reserved."