Peering across a curriculum gap

I've just spent a few hours in a telephone hook-up brainstorming about a Victorian curriculum project concerned with the Commonwealth Games. I'd been invited along, probably because I had had some conversations with the convenor of the bid about kps-style possibilities. I had a chance to talk about kps and spoke briefly about the main ideas and the kids on outcomes that have been reported from kps schools. I did not imagine that I was going to persuade folk about the merits of kps but thought it might be interesting in terms of having a conversation about what I anticipated would be competing notions of curriculum. What I was not prepared for was the unproblematic way that the exercise unfolded.

There was much discussion about engaging students. There was a lot of discussion about what this group of adults thought was interesting about the Games. There was an unproblematic notion that designing 'engaging' materials was simply a matter of making things engaging. Time and again there were suggestions for students to do pretend tasks in terms of simulations of issues or problems around the Games, of 'looking up' data from websites, of teachers or curriculum designers doing all the interesting work to make it 'engaging' for students. In the end I felt I must have been talking in tongues. Every time I ventured something along kps lines responses ranged from, yes I think we are doing that in the way you are proposing, or teachers would have trouble doing that in a 20 hr timeslot. In the end I was grateful for the experience and time to reflect on the problem. As each gesture was made to the ways teachers speak and think I was reminded of John Gatto's work and the problem of educational mindsets: when all you have is a curriculum framework, everything looks like a categorised outcome, assessment item or content to be designed.

My favourite piece on mindsets is a useful reminder of how fixed either side of this debate can become.