Guiding Questions

• What is curriculum?
• What is the role of curriculum in schools or what does it aim to do? 
• Who determines what gets taught and what does not get taught? Who does that impact and how?
• What is official knowledge and how is it determined?
• What are “banking” and “problem-posing” concepts of education and what do these have to do with liberation and social justice?
• Have any of this week’s readings resonated with your own experiences in education?

Post a Reflective Response (R2R)  

• Approximately 500 words in length
• Post should be substantive demonstrating knowledge of the readings
• Should address the Guiding Questions for the week
• See Syllabus for Success Criteria

Comment on Two R2R  Classmates’ Posts

• Approximately 300 words in length
• Post should be substantive demonstrating knowledge of the readings
• See Syllabus for Success Criteria

 Classmates’ Posts 

 classmate 1 

Curriculum is defined as the content of schooling in all of its forms. The Latin origins of the word appear to define it as a designed experience. Curriculum serves to provide a guide of content that should be taught, and as Levitt states, serves as a “platform for subsequent testing”.  People in power determine what gets taught and what doesn’t. As mentioned in “The Function of Curriculum in Schools”, there is an unequal distribution of power in every society, there are fewer people who have more power than those who don’t. This negatively affects those who are have very little power in society. Take for example Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and Obama’s Race to the Top act. Both were failures at helping children in low income schools. They don’t seem to understand the internal operations of schools. They also fail to consider that reconstructing the inside of a school does nothing to change the mentality of the students who are in and outside of the school, who may view themselves as a “higher” power than others.  

I found Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed to be very interesting and somewhat disturbing as well. Here, Freire explains the “banking” and “problem-posing” concepts of education. He defines the “banking” concept of education to be an “act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor”. The teacher gives students information in which they are meant to receive, memorize, and repeat. I was particularly moved by the quote, “it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system” (Freire 72). I often find myself struggling to teach the content that I am instructed to teach, I feel like the aim of the curriculum is to create “robots” who all think and act the same. There is very little room for their own opinion. Problem-posing education offers a solution to teacher-student contradiction found in banking education. In this concept, the teacher and the students “become jointly responsible in a process in which all grow” (Freire 80). These concepts of education relate to liberation and social justice, because in the “banking” concept of education, the students are being oppressed. Students aren’t exposed to reality and their thoughts are not authentic. However, in problem-posing education, students are no longer being oppressed. They are posed with problems that relate to themselves and their world and are increasingly being challenged, as opposed to being fed information.

classmate 2

Curriculum, according to The Function of Curriculum in Schools, is sanctified  content to be taught in schools. It is any document or plan that exist in a school or school system that defines the work of teachers, to the extent of identifying the content to be taught and the methods to be used in the process. The purpose of curriculum is to focus teaching within a common boundary and connect the work of classroom teachers across boundaries. The government (people in power, state officials ) are the ones who determine what gets taught and what does not. Micheal Apple tells us that the power over the curriculum has been taken away from the hands of professional educators and curriculum scholars. I know that within my school district, we teachers have no say in what curriculum we would like to use. We have just adapted the Maisa curriculum for reading around 2 years ago, and have been using Everyday Math for math for about 5 years. We all agree that neither of these curriculums work for the students we service, which are students who are not on grade level and continue to struggle with learning due to the content. But as I read Politics of Official Knowledge, it helps me understand that the state officials who create these curriculums have them designed for a certain group of people. I honestly just thought it was these particular curriculum that didn’t work for us, not that all curriculums were set up the same way.

When Bush started the No Child Left Behind Act, and Obama’s Race to the Top campaign, they were both suppose to be put in place to help children succeed, but as the reading from The Function of Curriculum in Schools points out, both of these plans failed to recognize the issues and problems of using schools to confront socioeconomic inequities. The Function of Curriculum in Schools and Politics of Official Knowledge, both state that curriculum is never a neutral assembly of knowledge, it is a selective tradition. The government says whose knowledge should be taught, and who should receive it. Official knowledge, according to Apple is the explicit knowledge that students are intended to learn. Curriculum has 3 aspects 1-institutioanl 2- formal and 3- hidden. It is really sad, that the people that are in the trenches going through it all, have only a say so in the “hidden” aspects. 

The readings made me think about how I teach my students, and how I was taught as a student. The first thing that comes to my mind when I read about textbooks, and how they meant for a certain group is black leaders. Textbooks only teach children about Dr. King, Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. They leave out lots of other amazing people black and white who fought for equality. And as a teacher I think about what Freire says about “banking” and I do agree with him. It is like training little robots because we through stuff out and expect them to remember it. However, due to the fact that the curriculum I use is not fit for my students, I also do a lot of teaching of my own things. I have to build a different foundation in order to try and place them where they need to be in terms of the curriculum and I am sure a lot of teacher do this because we know what our student need!