Seven Curriculum Mind Shifts Part 4

From Motivation to Liberation


Children come fully equipped with an insatiable to explore and experiment. Unfortunately the primary institutions of our society arc oriented predominantly toward controlling rather than learning, rewarding individuals for performing for others rather than cultivating their natural curiosity and impulse to learn (Senge 1990, p. 7)


Human beings are active, dynamic, self-organizing systems with integration of mind, body, and spirit. According to Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers, "Life's natural tendency is to organize. Life organizes into greater levels of complexity to support more diversity and greater sustainability" (1996, p. 30).


One of the purest examples of a self-organizing learning system that organizes into greater levels of complexity is the young child and toddlers arc in a constant state of exploring everything they can lay their hands, eyes, and lips on. They live in a state of continuous discovery: dismayed by anomaly, attracted to novelty, compelled to mastery, intrigued by mystery, curious, about discrepancy. They derive personal and If we accept that there feedback from their tactile/kinesthetic currently is a shift adventures. Their brain? are actually being away from the Indus-transformed with each new experience. trial model of society As children mature, the constraints of to a learning society, safety, family expectancies, cultural mores, and then our understand- public decency demand that the child's natural king of the focus of tendencies of exploration be curbed. This pro- education also needs vides both tensions and additional learnings as if children become acculturated. Unfortunately, training in mental and emotional passivity starts with the first days of school. Traditional school learning may cause students to perceive that the purpose of acquiring knowledge is for passing tests on the content rather than accumulating wisdom and personal meaning from the content. Students learn to read someone else's static accounts of history, study abstract theories of science, and comprehend complex ideas unrelated to their own life experiences and personal aspirations. They perceive learning to be a game of mental gymnastics with little or no relevant application beyond the school to everyday living, further inquiry, or knowledge production.


Thus children, whose natural tendency is to create personal meaning, are gradually habituated to think they are incapable of generating such information for themselves and that they lack the means to create and construct meaning on their own. All they can hope for is to acquire other peoples' meanings and answers to questions someone else deems important. Eventually students become convinced that knowledge is accumulated bits of information and that learning has little to do with their capacity for effective action, their sense of self, and how they exist in their world.


We must vow to serve and maintain this natural tendency of humans to inquire, experience, pattern, integrate, and seek additional opportunities to serve the human propensity for learning. A goal of education, therefore, should be to recapture and sustain the natural self-organizing learning tendencies inherent in all human beings: curiosity and wonderment, mystery and adventure, humor and playfulness, connection and finding, inventiveness and creativity, continual inquiry and insatiable learning.

 

IN SUMMARY

If we accept that there currently is a shift away from the industrial model of society to a learning society, then our understanding of the focus of education also needs to shift. This change will require a movement away from a measurable, content-driven curriculum to a curriculum that provides individuals with the dispositions necessary to engage in lifelong learning. Simultaneously, the vision of the educator needs to shift from the information provider to one of a catalyst, model, coach, innovator, researcher, and collaborator with the learner throughout the learning process.


Of all forms of mental activity, the most dirnc'i1t to induce is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, by placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework, all of which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking cap for the moment. It is easy to teach anybody a new fact... but it needs light from heaven above to enable a teacher to break the old framework in which the student is accustomed to seeing (Koestler 1972).


There is a necessary disruption when we shift mental models. If there is not, we are probably not shifting; we may be following new recipes but we will end up with the same stew! Growth and change is found in "disequilibrium," not balance. Out of chaos, order is built, learning takes place, understandings are forged, and gradually, organizations function more consistently as their vision is clarined, as their mission is forged, and their goals operationalized.


Mind shifts do not come easily, as they require letting go of old habits, old beliefs and old traditions. But in the words of Sylvia Robinson,"Some people think you are strong when you hold on. Others think it is when you let go." How strong are we?

 

REFERENCES

Bloom, B., and D. R. Krathwohl. 1956. Taxonomy of educational objectives. Handbook I. Cognitive domain. New York: David McKay.
Chopra, D. 1993. Ageless body. Timeless mind. New York: Harmony Books.
Costa, A., and B. Garmston. 1994. Cognitive coaching: A foundation for renaissance schools. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon

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