Affirmation comes thick here: Of curriculum itself as a site of collaborative inquiry – among teachers, with communities and often in the leadership of students. Clarifying this commitment becomes more important as – as we have seen throughout this pathway – the stakes of not doing so are asserted, often as an ethical matter.
What also is becoming clearer is that innovation creates its own conditions, and that this is a worthy and vitalizing work in education, while its dismissal or rejection is often fatiguing, familiar and disenfranchising, if widely seemingly legitimate and correct: ‘the way this is done.‘
How frail ‘really trying to keep that space alive’ can seem! And how encouraging its connection to ‘real’ professionalism (or professionalism of the real, as some would say…).
In this video, four teachers, one vice-principal/teacher, one vice-superintendent of schools and one superintendent of schools bring forward the many dimensions of curriculum as innovation.
They live and work in four rural school districts in British Columbia, in the province’s Kootenay and Peace river regions, to Gold Trail (in the river country south of the Cariboo). The interviews took place from 2012 to 2016.
Some questions to consider (we recommend brief small group discussions that can each then ‘compare notes’ about the different directions opened in how such ‘complicated’ conversations can go):
How do you respond to this video?
What does it bring to mind for you?
What questions do you have upon viewing this video?
How does ‘teaching as storytelling’ appeal to you? What does it make possible that may not be otherwise? In your view, following from Jeff, what specific relationships are a teacher’s stories about?
How is or is not technology a part of place? How should we think of place in light of educating responsive to the increasing ubiquity of technology.
Some educators talk about process as the deliverance from product in innovative curriculum design and implementation, others talk about engagement with process as the venue of curricular innovation (not simply its paradoxical product), while still others disavow process altogether, in the name of encounter and emergence. What is your inclination in this ‘complicated conversation’? (btw: it has many antecedents in different educational philosophies, and beyond…)
How are professionalism and a space of innovation connected or aligned in your view?
How do you react differently to educators describing what they know to those asserting what they want to do? How are these registers different in terms of teacher professionalism? What space do you make for each in your practice, and how do these relate to each other?
In your view, in terms of ‘creative curriculum,’ what really is failure? Does it presuppose a standard (by which we would not be dealing with innovation at all)? Or is it a useful continuing engagement with processes of change?
And so this conversation (like all really good ones) ends in the middle, among questions and commitments gathering to themselves their own forms of courage, their own nerve…to continue.
How do you see these where you educate? How would you like to?
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