Borderland

Today, clearing off the workbench, I found my old maul. To be precise, I found the maul head (the heavy wedge-shaped part) and the maul handle (wooden) that I bought to replace the one that broke in September when it started getting cold this fall and we began splitting wood again. The other replacement – the one we use now – has a plastic handle and a sharply curving wedge that even my 10-year-old can use to split knotty spruce. I’d never used a plastic one before, but since the old wood handle didn’t last even a year, I upgraded and took one of each. The new 2.0 version works OK, but it’s light, and won’t easily do the job for the firewood rounds that are very twisted. They lay around, battered and abandoned by the rest of the family, waiting for me. I can usually break them up by virtue of brute force, but sometimes they’re more trouble than they’re worth.

The maul head on the bench was the old heavy version that broke off the other handle. When I brought them home I left the fancy maul near the woodpile ready-to-use and the new handle went to the workbench. I drilled the handle stub out of the old head and tried fitting the new handle into it, but it was too tight for even my big framing hammer to pound home. Whittling the new handle down was my last choice. Better, I figured, to bang it on with something heavier – like the new maul, which was outside. I forgot about it until today. (Which might give you some idea of how the bench looked.) Of course, I tried all the same halfway measures that I used last September. I banged it on the concrete floor. I pounded it with the framing hammer. This all worried the dog, which was entertaining. Finally I broke down and took the half-minute walk to the woodpile. With the warm wooden handle in my one bare hand and the cold plastic handle in my other bare hand, it took about 2 swings and a few follow-up taps to marry handle and head.

I’m thinking about how many new things we need to use so that we can keep the old things functioning. Kids are an obvious example. We’re heading rapidly toward a world of who-knows-what and we want to make sure that when we get there someone will know what to do about it. We foresee that we might not be in any shape to deal with whatever-it-is, due to our impending dilapidation, so we’ll have trained assistants standing by to do what we ourselves can’t. The problem, of course, is will they? They may decide that the stuff we think needs doing doesn’t matter any more. Changes, changes…

Culture and technology don’t always keep pace. How much of the stuff that we do in school now should we scrap? How much do we salvage and repurpose? And which new tools should we use to get the old things done? Is there anything new under the sun? The question I really want to answer is whether curriculum has become an end in itself that actually obstructs learning.

Curriculum is a tool for accomplishing cultural and political objectives. It isn’t a neutral educational object no matter how hard we might wish. It has a history and a purpose. It’s a technology, designed for a world that someone imagined. I suspect that, for a variety of reasons, it has become incoherent. Our sense of it depends on who we are and the world we each imagine. Education has become the bastard child of many of the academic disciplines that it spawned. We’ve been studied and colonized by psychologists, ethnographers, linguists, historians, theologians, philosophers, and more recently by business administrators, and economists. Curriculum, springing from all these disciplines is as murky as a cesspool.

2006 is the year that I plan to reclaim my classroom from chaos, use tools and methods that suit authentic inquiry, and explore the meaning of curriculum with my students. We’ll do a research project on research projects. Among other things, I’m going to use Borderland to document the effort. This disruptive technology is going to help me disrupt another one. This may sound extreme, but I don’t think it is. For me, it’s the logical next step. I’ll save the history for another day, but I see this as an exercise in scholarship.

…scholarship in all of its forms becomes consequential only as it is understood by others-others who are engaged in related processes of discovery, invention, and investigations-and thus it becomes consequential as it stimulates, builds upon, critiques, or otherwise contributes to any community of scholars who depend on one another’s discoveries, critical reviews, and inventive applications to move the work of the field ahead (Shulman, 1988, p.26).

Like the maul(s), the new tools need to work with the old at least for a while. I see room for a conversation with my students about what’s relevant to them. Rather than dumping content on them, we’re going to explore what’s there, talk about it, and express our understanding of it through a variety of media as we go. Very simply, I want to build a curriculum with my students, based on what we have now. I’ll document the experience, and I want them to record their understandings on a website reserved for that purpose. It’s a colaborative teacher-student research project – disciplined inquiry; curriculum as conversation.

Source:
Shulman, L. S. (1988). Disciplines of Inquiry in Education: A New Overview. In R. M. Jaeger(Ed.), Complimentary Methods for Research in Education (pp. 3-29). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.