Writing curriculum together

It might have been 1984. The late Harro Van Brummelen made a call for high school teachers interested in writing curriculum units for novel study. Lloyd den Boer was there, plus Dennis DeGroot and Ray Sutton. It was a new experience for all of us. We brought our suggestions: Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton; The Pearl by John Steinbeck; Rascal by Sterling North; and The Stone Angel by Margaret Lawrence.

The process

We followed a traditional group-work exercise and brainstormed our frustrations, questions, joys, favourite parts and confusions about each book. Sutton told us fascinating stories about zebras in South Africa being infested with various parasites. I related my experiences on fishing the Rock River, the setting of Rascal. I recall Den Boer being very helpful in suggesting that Bram (in The Stone Angel) represented a certain élan vital.

Then we shared our experiences of teaching these books; what worked and what didn’t. We distributed copies of assignments, worksheets and student responses we had tried.

Perhaps most importantly, we discussed at length what an explicit and implicit Christian perspective would contribute to writing a curriculum unit on these novels. Van Brummelen helped us sort through our previously-used assignments and create new activities that would help those who weren’t traditional essay-writers or note-takers. Curriculum and pedagogy began to merge in our work.

One of the things we did that benefitted all students was teach them how to keep a mini-log with a key word, idea and page number of things that struck them as significant. We called it indexing, and it proved helpful in my experiences over the years.

We desired and expected teachers to adapt these units. Some of the units were very successful for the teachers who used them.

Bits-and-pieces curriculum

Later in my teaching career, I was assigned “curriculum development time” that was, unfortunately, a failure in inspiring teachers to work co-operatively. Most of my colleagues desired units that they could implement with changes rather than the creative, co-operative activity we had used in those early days. Some teachers searched the internet for ready-to-use exercises and units for their lesson planning. I was, and still am, quite disappointed that this occurred. Curriculum seemed to me, in those later years, to be an individualistic activity of picking and choosing; the gestalt of the curriculum was abandoned for a bits-and-pieces approach.

Now the internet isn’t the only resource for cutting corners: artificial intelligence (AI) is making things easier for teachers. When someone suggests that AI will help students and teachers in curriculum and instruction I am saddened and discouraged. What happened to working together with real, live human beings in a shared cause led by religious direction?

It’s quite common to hear the following sentiment about AI: “It’s with us and we’d better deal with it.” How does AI build school spirit or support a community and its members? Is a teacher reduced to being a cog in an increasingly impersonal world rather than a passionate, caring, empathetic, servant-leader of children?

We have a lot to learn from our Métis and Indigenous neighbours whose model of working communally towards consensus-building stands in sharp contrast to what AI-sponsored learning offers.