Curriculum Making

and Teachers’
Best-Loved Selves

CHERYL J. CRAIG,
PROFESSOR

UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON

HANGZHOU NORMAL
UNIVERSITY

HANGZHOU, ZHEJIANG,
CHINA
Narrative Inquiry as Teacher Professional Development
 Teachers’ Best-Loved Selves

Hong Kong Portugal

 Student
Learning
Development of
teacher identity

Teacher’s Curriculum
implementation
best-loved self and
dissemination

Personal
Experiences
with research
participants
 1997-2003
Houston-Area School Reform Movement

Formative Evaluator Formal Evaluator

 2 elementary schools  High school

 2 middle schools
 1 high schools
 Progress

Teacher professional development built into the

school day

Assistant principal and school counselor roles

combined

Arts infused throughout the curriculum

Literacy, mathematics, and science instruction

improved

After-school activities and technology programs added

Networks of teachers and schools established

 Three Teacher Groups

School Portfolio Groups

Faculty Academy

Critical Friends Groups

Unable to Continue on the Positive Pathways

Final constraints

Shifts in leadership

Changes in focus
The Practices of Individual Teachers

A belief

A protocol

An arts-based teaching experience

A collaboration

Teachers’ reflective journal writing

Should we aspire for excellence in schools?
Of course we should.
But in aspiring for excellence we need to
weigh with care with what understanding of excellence
we are calling upon teachers and students to excel…

(Aoki, 1990)
Different Visions of Excellence
 Debate Deliberation

Decision

“Fountainhead of the
Curriculum Decision”
(Schwab, 1983)
Teacher-as-
Curriculum-
Maker

The Primacy
of the
Teacher

Organizing
Planning
Orchestrating

Student
Learning
 Learning

Teaching
Curriculum
 Seeing Big

Seeing Small
 Teacher-
Parent-proof
proof
families
curriculum
A Discretionary Curricular Space
 Teacher
(Classroom
Teacher)

Subject
Matter Curriculum-
(Reading,
Writing, Making Learner
(Student)
Mathematics,
Science) Situation

Milieu
(Public
Policy)
 Teacher
(Classroom
Teacher)

Subject
Matter Curriculum-
(Reading,
Writing, Making Learner
(Student)
Mathematics,
Science) Situation

Milieu
(Public
Policy)
Teacher-as-
Curriculum-
Maker

Teacher-as-
Curriculum-
Implementer
Learner
Milieu
Subject Matter
Teachers
Interim Analysis
 The classroom practices which are supposed to
realize curricular programs and intentions with
learners are valid only to the extent permitted by the
competence, the experience, and the state of health
possessed by the teacher at the moment when she/he
teachers…

Schwab
 …the classroom practices with learners, which are
supposed to realize subject matter and the desires of
policy makers and society in the milieu, are valid
only to the extent permitted by the competence, the
experience, and the state of health possessed by the
teacher while curriculum making…
Teachers’ Best-Loved Selves
 learner habits of
inquiry inquirer emotionally
accessible
model

agent of
education prevailing
in its intelligent
moods
entirety

has feelings
more to about others
characteristics know
competent about

involves
narrative
experienced inquiry
propensities

cultivates
attitudes
possesses toward works with
feelings about knowing students’
personality potentialities
self
In short
The teacher wants something more for the learner than the capacity
to give back to the teacher a report of subject matter (determined
within the milieu). The teacher wants the learner to possess a
knowledge or a skill (valued in the milieu) in the same way that the
teacher possesses it, as a part of the teacher’s best-loved self…
The teacher wants to communicate some of the fire the teacher
feels, some of the Eros the teacher possesses, for a valued object.

Schwab, 1954/1978
The teacher’s controlled and conscious purpose is to

, not captivate, the learner.

Schwab, 1954/1978
Distilled to the essence

 Education cannot separate subject matter from

feeling and action, whether in the interest

of the one or the other. Training of the intellect
[unavoidably] must take place in a milieu of
feelings and must express itself in
actions, either symbolic or actuation.
Continuing,

 We may employ the emotional and active factors existent in

learners and teachers as means for intensifying and
facilitating the process of curriculum making—or ignore
them and suffer…an alienation which places them in active
opposition to [the milieu’s] purposes.

Schwab, 1954/1978
Interim Summary
 learner habits of
inquiry inquirer emotionally
accessible
model

agent of
education
in its
Best-Loved Self
prevailing
moods
intelligent
entirety

has feelings
more to about others
characteristics know
competent about

involves
narrative
experienced inquiry
propensities

cultivates
attitudes
possesses toward works with
feelings about knowing students’
personality potentialities
self
Should we aspire for excellence in schools?
Of course we should.
But in aspiring for excellence we need to
weigh with care with what understanding of excellence
we are calling upon teachers and students to excel…

(Aoki, 1990)
 I've had many teachers who taught us soon forgotten things/
But only a few like her who created in me a new thing, a new attitude, a new
hunger/…
What deathless power lies in the hands of such a person.

From Captured Fireflies

John Steinbeck
...a teacher in search of his/her own
freedom may be the only kind of teacher
who can arouse young persons to go in
search of their own…

()

Greene, 1988
Questions and Queries?