A Curriculum of Hope

As rich in humanity as in knowledge

Debra Kidd

• Publisher: Independent Thinking Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781781353486
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Written by Debra Kidd, A Curriculum of Hope: As rich in humanity as in knowledge explores how good curriculum design can empower schools to build bridges between their pupils' learning and the world around them.

A great many schools are wondering how they can build a curriculum model that meets the demands of government policy as well as the needs of the children and communities they serve. In Curriculum of Hope, Debra illustrates how teachers can deliver learning experiences that genuinely link knowledge to life.

Working on the premise that a strong curriculum is supported by five key pillars of practice coherence, credibility, creativity, compassion and community she presents a plethora of examples that demonstrate how schools, parents, pupils and the wider local community can learn together to build from within.

Debra enquires into the ways in which schools can create units of work that are both knowledge- and humanity-rich, and challenges the view that the role of children is simply to listen and learn instead advocating their active engagement with local and global issues.

She does so by delving into the role of pedagogy as a means of empowering children, and by exploring some of the more overlooked pedagogical tools that can have a great impact on children's learning and well-being story, movement and play as well as some of the recent research into memory and retention.

Towards the back of the book you will find case studies demonstrating how teachers can work with both their own and other subject departments across the school to plan in ways that allow for pupil choice, autonomy and responsibility. Furthermore, there are some accompanying planning documents for these examples provided in the appendix (The Seed Catalogue) which you may find useful, and these documents are also available for download.

Suitable for teachers and leaders in all schools.

13

Chapter 1

Getting Weedy

The Art of Resistance

A core curriculum?

Let’s say …

A new minister for education is appointed in a new government in a new political party, the likes of which we have never seen before. Swept in on a tide of hope, they stand poised to make their mark.

This human being looks at the vast task ahead of them. It’s daunting but they’re proud. They don’t know much about education; they weren’t state educated themselves and it’s a long time since they were at school, but they want to do a good job. They want to make their mark. It’s only human.

How does one make one’s mark in politics? There are two ways: to act wisely and carefully with long-term goals in mind or to act expediently with short-term goals in mind. Our current political system very much favours the latter approach, and so our well-meaning, well-intentioned but ultimately inexperienced secretary of state makes their first mistake – putting the survival and progression of career and party first.

Short-term goals attract media attention – the message must be sharp and enticing. Our minister examines the zeitgeist. They make a proclamation: the education system is ‘broken’ but they intend to ‘fix it’. A few skewed statistics playing on deep parental fears is all it takes. Attention is paid and reform is promised.

The fix must be quick. Ideally it won’t involve changing the law, which takes time, so the curriculum is obviously the place to start. And so we come to our second strand of human fallibility. The minister, suspicious of ‘experts’ who may not be 14politically aligned with them, decides to make their own decisions. It is decided that the solution is perfectly simple: ‘Look at me – I’m successful. What led me here was my education (in the fervour of the moment they forget about their economic advantages, sociocultural privileges and connections). What I had, all children should have. What I learned, all children should learn. What I am passionate about, all children should be passionate about!’

The minister sits at a desk, pondering what may be missing from the curriculum. And there in the fruit bowl is an apple. A light bulb goes on.

‘What could symbolise this nation more than an apple?’ they think, leaping from their seat with excitement. No matter that the apple comes from Central Asia – the minister is fondly remembering long summers in the country, the orchard, the sound of bees and the clinking of tea cups in the garden. In their mind, the apple becomes synonymous with all that will make this nation ‘great again’.

And so, one Saturday morning, as the weekly education briefing email lands in the inboxes of head teachers across the nation, it is declared that apples are to form a cornerstone of the new ‘heritage and health’ curriculum. And, by Monday, apples are being discussed in every staffroom in the land.

The minister is pleased but uneasy. These teachers are a tricky bunch. A lot is resting on the success of this project. The eyes of the world, and the boss, are on this new idea. It has to work. And so within a month, a small team of graduates (with no teaching experience) have whipped up a policy document listing the minimum expectations around the teaching of apples and neatly listed them into objectives:

• Pupils should learn to identify at least three types of apple.
• Pupils should know that apples grow in temperate climates.
• Pupils should be able to identify an apple as a fruit and name other fruits.

And so on …

Just to make sure, the minister adds a test – an apple ‘check’ – and declares that the results will be published, that all children will take the check at the same time, regardless of their age, and all must be above average. The media laud the rigour and glory of the new curriculum. Teachers and mathematicians sigh. 15

The curriculum lands in my inbox along with an email asking me to lead on the teaching of apples. At that point, as a teacher, I have a choice. I can take each one of those dry objectives and allocate a lesson to them. I can begin each lesson with the objective written on the board and get the children to dutifully copy it down, providing evidence for when OrchEd come knocking on the door. I can weave in lots of retrieval practice in preparation for the check. I can create dual-coded resources to aid memorisation. I can even try to liven things up a bit by putting bowls of chopped apple out on tables for the children to taste so they can complete the table on their worksheet. And when all the children – dry and dull but compliant and capable – pass the check, I can put up a banner outside the school.

Or, I can ask myself, ‘What is interesting about an apple?’

I might think about incorporating the apple into a much bigger unit of work on Fibonacci, the golden ratio and symmetry in nature, because I’ve identified a need to get children excited about maths.

I might consider whether it’s true that ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’ and incorporate my teaching of apples into a much wider unit on human health, looking at the impact of antioxidants on the body and exploring whether some apples are better than others in this respect.

I might go further and ask more philosophical questions about the apple. How has it come to be a symbol of knowledge? Why was it traditionally given to teachers as a gift? Why is it that in Western depictions of the story of the Garden of Eden it is an apple that Eve plucks from the Tree of Knowledge, yet in Islamic depictions of the story it is a pomegranate?

I might reflect on how our climate and geography, our flora and fauna, impact on our social, cultural and religious icons. How do these shape our stories, our myths, our legends? Can it explain why an apple is sometimes regarded as dangerous (Snow White, Alan Turing)?

I might look at the mythology around the logo of Apple Inc. and why it is so richly steeped in all of the above …

Within all of these possibilities, I could take care to weave in the relatively low-level knowledge that our new minister requires. I would take care to ensure that my children passed the test – oops, sorry, the ‘check’. But they would be bright-eyed, 16curious and much more knowledgeable as a result of these latter choices. Under this interpretation, there is no need for banners outside of school because the children run home to talk about their learning. Their parents spread the word. And before long, people are knocking on the doors of the school asking to come into the Garden of Eden.

When schools start to think in these ways – finding the core, if you like, the potential areas of interest in a curriculum – many things change. It is not simply that the knowledge is somehow richer or more powerful. There is a deep impact on the attitudes of children towards learning and their perceptions of self. In the words of one parent of a child in a primary school with whom I have been working:

My daughter spent the first three years at school feeling ‘stupid’ (her word) and being told she was never going to reach her target. With the new curriculum she comes home quoting facts and information, wanting to discuss topics in a way she has never done before. She’s far more engaged and has completely thrown us with her depth of knowledge and understanding of topics/issues. The curriculum has allowed her to progress and grow in a way she couldn’t before. She is not afraid and will try anything given to her.

Words like these, let loose into a local community, do far more for the reputation of a school than any inspection report (although what kind of inspector wouldn’t value this too?). What would parents say about the way curriculum is delivered to children in your school? About how their children see themselves as a direct result of their experiences and interactions in school?

The limitations of a ‘national’ curriculum

It seems fitting that the word curriculum has its roots in the Latin currere – to run a course. It seems that is what we do: set children off on a race, with the expectation that there will be winners and losers. A running course has no diversions or tributaries. Taking a break is frowned upon. And, what’s worse, in our current 17system there are no staggered starts. We turn a blind eye to the fact that some children will need to run further and harder than others in order to try to end up at the same point. In his book Thinking Allowed, Mick Waters refers to the searing inequalities of the ‘inside lane’ and ‘outside lane’ (or ‘gutter’) in this race and our inability to adequately provide structures to support those on the outside.1 In the recently published Timpson Review into exclusions in England and Wales, we see a worrying trend towards bumping children off the track in the pursuit of appearing to have improved the outcomes of a school.2 Weeding them out of the system altogether.

Our notion of what a curriculum is has been increasingly lost to the desire to show improvement through testing. Waters is careful to point out that a curriculum should always be more than a national curriculum which only sets out minimum expected standards of study. For many schools in England there is no need to even adhere to the standards of the national curriculum since academies and free schools are exempt, while in other countries the curriculum is sufficiently vague as to allow for a great deal of interpretation through the ‘enacted’ curriculum. This means that teachers have more freedom than we like to think we have when deciding on how the curriculum we enact in our schools will impact on children.

In designing your own curriculum model, you are shifting towards creating your ‘school curriculum’, which Waters simply outlines as:

The school curriculum comprises the elements that young people need:

• to nurture them as individuals and meet the hopes we have for them
• and help them to appreciate their community
• so that they learn about their county, country, the world and the universe
• and it includes the national curriculum.3

18What kind of curriculum holds hope for young people and for the world they will inhabit and shape? What kind of curriculum helps children to appreciate their community (rather than encouraging them to get the hell out of their community)? What kind of curriculum looks beyond the national, the immediate, the tyranny of the test and builds this kind of learning experience? Perhaps it is one that resists the notion of learning as a race and instead embraces it as an exploration. What if, instead of running to the end point of the education system, or even to the end of a unit of work, the purpose of the course lay in the journey itself? What might that course look like?

By using the example of the apple, I am trying to make the point that we always have choices. As teachers, whenever we set off on a curriculum journey, we have the power to decide whether the children need to get from A to B directly and expediently via the quickest mode of transport; whether to take the scenic bus route and take in the sights along the way but end up efficiently and predictably at the end point; or whether we walk in a spirit of adventure, happy with some diversions but with a map in our hands. I think most teachers would agree that it is probably best not to get lost altogether – the model which might be better known as chaos but which some mistakenly confuse with ‘discovery’ or ‘inquiry’.

It will all be dependent on what you are learning and why, and there are opportunities and pitfalls with each approach. The skill lies in choosing the most appropriate method to suit your purpose. I would argue that the teaching of phonics is probably deserving of the Central Line, but many other areas of learning can be plaited into a good walk with a map. It is this aspect of curriculum – that which sits outside of the mechanics of phonics, number bonds or times tables – that is the focus of this book. It concerns the teaching that is situated in the realm of understanding who we are, where we come from, what we might become and how we impact on those around us. The big questions of education and of life.

When it comes to curric...

Table of contents

• Praise for A Curriculum of Hope
• Title Page
• Epigrpah
• To the Pedagogical Activists of the World
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction: The Groundwork
• Chapter 1: Getting Weedy
• Chapter 2: Tooling Up
• Chapter 3: Plaits and Umbrellas
• Chapter 4: The Wasteland?
• Chapter 5: The Unique Lives of Adolescents
• Chapter 6: A Curriculum for Wales
• Chapter 7: Exotic Plants
• Chapter 8: Tending to Saplings
• Chapter 9: Cultivating Hope (in Trying Times)
• Appendix: The Seed Catalogue – Some Examples of Planning
• Bibliography
• Copyright
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