Private Practices by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781135342586
Google: XSGzAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2013-10-23T04:52:33+00:00

The Hidden Curriculum

Erroll Boyle, Matt Peterson and Joleen Gagnon knew that they were teaching more than just literature when they taught Literature. They were aware that they were using the school subject ‘Literature’ to teach a number of other things besides, and they had even made conscious decisions to do so. When I asked them to clarify, for me, what they were intentionally teaching through Literature, both teachers began to answer by saying ‘skills’. By ‘skills’ they seemed to be referring chiefly to the mechanical aspects of writing, spelling, handwriting, and punctuation. They were also clear about teaching ‘good study habits’: keeping neat notebooks, completing assignments on time, and being willing to revise and improve one’s writing.

They had chosen to teach these particular ‘skills’ and attitudes as a result of certain beliefs which they shared — I assume they believed these things because they acted in accordance with them, during their time at school, day after day and month after month — and it seemed to me that these shared beliefs lay just below the surface of consciousness, informing almost every curricular decision. Erroll, Matt and Joleen. for example, believed that knowledge and the curriculum were things created by an external authority. They believed that teachers transmitted knowledge and delivered the curriculum, but that someone else provided both these components in the first instance. They accepted the responsibility for making intelligent choices among the different curricular alternatives — choices based both on their experiences with the children and on their own talents and preferences — but they did not expect to create the actual knowledge or the curriculum used themselves, nor did they expect the children to do so. These Oak Town adults acted as if children could not be trusted to choose for themselves what they should learn; as far as they were concerned the teachers had to be in control of what was to be studied. The idea was that skills had to be taught, or the children would not learn them at all.

Because they assumed that knowledge had to be created by an external authority, Matt and Joleen did not feel free to leave the basal reader behind them without substituting another printed program, such as Tom Penner’s ‘Structured Tales Curriculum’. They accepted a number of views: that knowledge existed both in a literary work and in someone else’s commentary on it; that knowledge was there to be explained and understood; and that their task, when teaching, was to uncover and present it, while the children’s task, in turn, was to memorize and retain it. I want to note here, however, that the Oak Town teachers did not always accept the authority of a text, or the idea that knowledge resides in the text. Resistance to those ideas would, sometimes, occur when Matt Peterson encouraged a student to construct his or her own answer to a question about a novel, or asked a student, ‘What do you think?’

For the most part, however, because they felt that they

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