In the late 1940s, Beatrice Doonan of the Groveland School in Wayzata, Minnesota faced a problem that is still familiar to teachers in todayâs classrooms. Ms. Doonan had a difficult time getting her fifth grade classroom of 18 boys and 11 girls to feel a sense of âunityâ needed to facilitate a cooperative planning approach. Indeed, Ms. Doonan was tired of âhav[ing] to assume the role of a policemanâ and felt she needed to make significant changes in order for the class to embrace âthe freedom to experiment, and to make mistakes if necessary, and the opportunity to solve their problems, as they saw themâ (Doonan, c.1947).
When we came across this document, an eight-page report about one teacherâs attempt to remake her classroom in a rural school in the upper-Midwest just after World War II, we were immediately struck by how contemporary the challenges expressed by this educator seemed. As former teachers and current educational researchers, we have seen countless educators try to shift their classrooms from teacher-centered, âsage on the stageâ setups to student-centered, cooperative learning spaces. And while the teachers engaging in this work tend to point out many similar challenges and impediments, the problems always seem contemporary, as if we educators are perpetually trying to figure out how to meet the same challenges within our classrooms.
Yet, over the past 100-plus years, there have been countless Ms. Doonans working in American schools: in big cities and small towns found in every corner of the country; in pre-schools, elementary schools, and high schools; and in communities that reflect the full range of the United Statesâ demographic diversity. The work of these educators is part of a history of teaching that has played out in the daily experiences of students, teachers, and administrators. It is a past usually considered so mundane that it is not often archived, written about, or presented as relevant to our current efforts to improve education. We argue that the Ms. Doonans of the past are, in fact, vital to our future, perhaps more so than the major figures of traditional and typical educational and curriculum history.
Educators have long been wrestling with how to best harness the dynamics within the classroom. Philip Jacksonâs (1968) book, Life in Classrooms, directs educators to the importance of âthe daily grindâ of schooling: the routines, roles, and repetitions of classroom experience for teachers and students. For Jackson, the habitual features of teaching and learning could lull an observer into believing that education is a rather simple, unchanging endeavor. He wrote,
Classroom lifeâŠis too complex an affair to be viewed or talked about from any single perspectiveâŠThis means we must read, and look, and listen, and count things, and talk to people, and even muse introspectively over the memories of our own childhood. (Jackson, 1968, pp. viiâviii)
Simultaneously, as educators we know that the classroom is a space where many issues are wrestled with and lived out in messy and indeterminate ways. Maxine Greene (1988), drawing from her passion for arts and imagination, encouraged teachers and students to release their imagination and to look at lived experiences from as-ifs rather than from fixed realities. She states, âThere are always vacancies: there are always roads not taken, vistas not acknowledged. The search must be ongoing; the end can never be quite knownâ (Greene, 1988, p. 15).
This leads us to one of the central paradoxes of the profession: teaching is full of both constants and changes. Becoming an insightful, incisive educator means understanding the dynamics between the persistent features of the classroom and the rapid developments within and beyond the schoolâs walls. Put another way, a keen knowledge of how the educational environment in classrooms has developed and changed over time empowers educators to critically view current classroom life and informs efforts to support current and future students.
Decades before Jackson and Greene articulated these notions, Ms. Doonan and her fifth graders embraced a classroom life that was complex, incomplete, and brimming with perspectives. Ms. Doonan described her effort to remake her classroom into a cooperative space as follows:
This I did by continually setting up situations in which the whole class participated. The problems we discussed were real problems from the playground, the hallways, the lunchroom, and the classroomâŠ. Through this continual process of sharing, the boys and girls gradually accepted more responsibility in carrying out their plans. I allowed them freedom to experiment and the opportunity to solve their own problems, as they saw them and to make mistakes if necessary.When we had a common problem to solve, we moved our seats into a circle. I also found a spot in the circle. It seemed that through changing the physical setup of our room, it fostered group participation. There seemed to be better participation. There seemed to be better interaction, or give and take among the members. Finally, when we arrived at a solution to our problem, it was the result of many ideas. (Doonan, c.1947)
Beatrice Doonanâs life in her classroom became richer when she reflected on her subjectivities, her memories of teaching and learning, and her studentsâ learning and teaching. Her reflections were part of an informal network organized by Neva L. Boyd, a pioneering, if often overlooked, educator who helped develop and promote play-based educational and therapeutic practices through her work at Hull House, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and finally the Illinois Department of Public Welfare (Simon, 2011). During the postwar period, Boyd provided training for teachers and schools, such as Ms. Doonan at the Groveland School, who wanted to incorporate more cooperative and recreational learning experiences into their classrooms. Boyd collected reports from these schools as part of her own research, creating a record of these pedagogical experiments as well as spaces for educators to describe and reflect on the process.
1.1 Why We Need This Book
We teach curriculum foundation courses for general teacher education and graduate programs. In these courses, we introduce theoretical and historical analyzes of curriculum and education with the goal that teacher candidates and in-service teachers might explore curriculum from historical perspectives. We encourage students to use these broader historical and theoretical contexts to inform their teaching and learning. When our students are provided opportunities to reflect the histories of teaching and learning within a historical context, most students find direct connections between curricular issues of the past and the present. This investigation promotes an in-depth, historical analysis of contemporary curriculum issues to reflect on their practice and thus to rethink their assumptions about teaching: that the ways they experience schooling is universal; that the way schools work today are how they have always worked; and, that teachers and students have limited influence on how schools function.
Our initial thought for writing this book originated from our experiences with and reflections on historicizing curriculum and reconnecting it with the present. Practitioners tend to consider theory-practice as a dichotomy, not as a coherent, interwoven curriculum inquiry. Consequently, many teacher education programs have eliminated foundations courses, as these classes do not provide practical knowledge for teacher candidates to readily implement in their classrooms. We argue that the history of education, but even more poignantly the history of curriculum, should be maintained as a crucial component of teacher education. By thinking about practice theoretically and considering theories practically, this book attempts to develop theory-practice as a coherent, interwoven framework for educational practitioners. In this manner, theory-practice is bound to teachersâ and studentsâ lived, educational experiences and involves making space to decipher and theorize our lived experiences. In the case of this book, we hope teachers and their students will theorize from the experiences of past educators and make connections to their own current realities. This Reader delves into the past, present, and future continuum of historical inquiry with the aim of developing historically conscious educational spaces. While engaging with this Reader, teachers examine unique experiences of individuals, groups, and institutions from the past through archival sources. Furthermore, they advance historical consciousness by making connections to similar issues over time through secondary source-based synthesis essays and related primary sources in this Reader. According to RĂŒsen (1993), historical consciousness entails learning âfrom the actions, ideas and mores of the past, recognizing how much things [change], yet still taking the past into account in facing the futureâ (RĂŒsen, 1993, as cited in Seixas, 2017, p. 596). This form of historical consciousness is genetic historical consciousness, that which requires historiographical knowledgeâreading multiple historical perspectives and interpretationsâin order to come to oneâs own understanding. In this case, teachers review and rethink their experience today with the use of historical consciousness and thus take actions on our contemporary challenges with the assistance of these multiple understandings of the past.
This Reader provides comprehensive, inquiry-based analysis of curriculum issues by challenging the compartmentalized understanding of theory and curriculum foundations through multiple perspectives. A categorical division of curriculum foundations perpetuates the misconception that the theories and movements in curriculum history are clear, distinct, and almost partisan. This presentation provides the impression that one m...