What is meant by 'curriculum'? a response to Eisner
My first thought about "curriculum" was simple: it's the list of things we're supposed to teach, the prescribed content and skills in a subject area, laid out in official documents. Eisner complicated that in a way I found genuinely useful.
Three stops:
First, the idea that schools teach three curricula at once, explicit, implicit, and null. I had never thought about what schools don't teach as a curriculum, but Eisner's point that "ignorance is not simply a neutral void" stopped me. What students never encounter shapes the questions they can ask and the lives they can imagine. That's curriculum too, even though it appears in no document.
Second, the timetable as a teacher. Eisner's observation that the schedule itself teaches, that 50-minute blocks teach students not to get too involved, that arts placed on Friday afternoons teach students that art is play and not serious work, made me think about my own schooling. I never questioned why math was always in the morning and art always after lunch. The structure was sending me messages I absorbed without noticing.
Third, the parents who insisted the whole school be structured, not just their children's classroom, "because what happens on the playground is as important as what happens in classes." That stopped me because they were right, and it's a reminder that curriculum isn't just what happens in a room, it's the entire culture of the place.
How this expands my idea of curriculum:
I used to think of curriculum as a document, content, outcomes, assessment. Eisner reframes it as everything a school teaches, intentionally or not. That's much bigger, and honestly a little overwhelming, but also clarifying. It means I'm always teaching something, even when I'm not "covering" anything. The BC Provincial Curriculum fits neatly into Eisner's explicit category, it's the mandated, public, advertised menu of what students should learn. But Eisner would push me to ask: what's the implicit curriculum of a BC math classroom? What does it teach about competition, compliance, speed, and who counts as a "math person"? And what's being left out, the null curriculum, when we focus on curricular competencies and content? Financial literacy, the history of mathematical ideas, the mathematics of social justice, these are all areas I'd want to think about as I plan.
Comments
Post a Comment