Spring 2007

Curriculum for the 21st century

Balancing life to text and text to life

Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski argue for bringing student interests and the curriculum into a balanced alignment through strong relationships and relevance.

The objects that the child makes are as useful as those made by the carpenter; but, unlike the work of the carpenter, the value of the child’s work does not exist in them, but in the child that made them.

Otto Salomon (1892)

When Ed Ames was a boy in Maine, he grew up in a fishing village with a passion to be a fisherman. His family had fished the Maine waters since before the Revolutionary War. Despite his passion, his father told Ed he was too small and too frail to become a professional fisherman, so Ed went off to school. He received a degree in marine biology and merged his love of fishing and science by conducting detailed scientific studies of spawning, habitat, and fishing patterns that are guided in part by the anecdotal experiences of ageing fishermen. Ed’s insightful research, grounded in his deep interests as a young boy, earned him a McArthur award.

Every learner is an Ed Ames, with interests that can be used to create relevant and powerful learning opportunities. Unfortunately, these interests are seldom recognised and rarely exploited by schools.

We believe that most attempts by schools to increase relevance fail because teachers overlook three core requirements. The first is that relevance is in the eye—and mind—of the student, not the teacher. Second, relevance redefines the student–teacher relationship, requiring the teacher to establish a relationship with the student through his interests. Finally, relevance requires a balanced attention to student interests and the curriculum.

Relevance begins with the individual learner

It is the learner who decides what and from whom he will learn. Relevance is about deep connections between the student, his emerging interest in a given area, and the complex learning challenges that define that area. Relevance starts and ends with what the student really wants to learn and broadens out as the student makes connections and wants to learn more. Within this conceptualisation of relevance, determining what is relevant is itself an essential part of each student’s learning.

Relevance requires a balanced attention to student interests and academics

Traditionally, schools and colleges have featured learning that employs an approach that could be characterised as ‘text to life’. They emphasise in their teaching the world of words in all manner of texts—textbooks most prominently, if not exclusively—in order to prepare students for the world of action. Blending ‘life to text’ and ‘text to life’ or relevance to academics and academics to relevance is extremely important. Ed’s story, for example, is the classic merging of life and text; neither alone would have prepared him for success in his work.

Addressing what is relevant requires a special student– teacher relationship

Establishing a successful student– teacher partnership opens the door to a unique and powerful opportunity to employ and build upon relevance and relationships in the quest for rigorous student learning. As the teacher begins to engage the student, she comes to know him well as a person and a learner, and understands his interests and what and how he learns most productively and comfortably.

As the student discovers and expresses his interests, he will have these questions: How can I learn to do this work? What about it is attractive to me? Why does it interest me and fulfil me as a person?

The attentive teacher will enter the dialogue by introducing additional questions for the student to contemplate: Does society (and significant adults) regard what I am learning as valuable? Do I understand the connection between what I am learning, what I need to learn, and its value to me and society? What more do I need to learn in order to achieve mastery?

Working with the relevance– relationship partnership as we have described it is extremely challenging in a traditional school, but much less so in small schools offering personalised programs. In Big Picture Schools (www.bigpicture.org/), for example, each teacher works with a group of 15–17 students for all four years of their high school experience. Powerful relationships emerge during this extended time and allow the teacher to develop and work from deep understandings of the learner formed over time. The teacher is able to respond expertly to the student’s needs, interests, and uniqueness in ways that positively impact learning and development. In such an environment, it is impossible for a student to be left unknown, much less left behind. The challenge is to fully use this relationship, to nudge the student, gently but firmly, to the edge of his competence.

Of course, the nature of teacher– student engagement in the typical school rarely approximates this critical level—although it often does with those out-of-school teachers. And recent attempts to institute high school advisory systems are with few exceptions tepid instruments poorly implemented, aimed at helping the student fit herself to the school rather than vice versa, failing to exploit the potential for learning of and acting on students’ interests. Even most career academy systems do not bring relevance to the level of each student, opting for half measures that require only slightly more accommodation to each student’s interests. The curriculum is still firmly in control rather than at the service of the student’s interests. And few if any of those teachers from the students’ out-of-school interests are allowed into the mix.

What signs should we look for? Our observations have revealed these:

• There is sophisticated and nuanced language used between the student and teacher as well as other students.
• There are issues, projects, and other objects that both the student and teacher find interesting. Both work to understand more about themselves through these issues, projects, and objects.
• There is a sense of trust and respect as well as give and take between the student and teacher.
• Parents, teachers, mentors, and the student all know one another through the student’s work and interests.

The path from relevance to relationships leads quickly to motivation and engagement, of course, but it also leads the learner to be open to discovering what the world regards as relevant with respect to his interests. The aesthetics of the student–teacher relationship is founded upon intimate knowledge of the student’s interests that helps the teacher prepare the student to embrace and engage in rigorous learning.

Without establishing a strong foundation in relationships and relevance, it will be difficult for the teacher to prepare the student to engage in rigorous learning and work. Without establishing a strong foundation in relationships and relevance, motivating the student will be extremely difficult and be based primarily on external incentives. Conversely, with a strong foundation in place built on relationships and relevance, a teacher, and in the bigger picture, a school, can better accommodate itself to each student, rather than demanding that each student accommodate himself to the school.

None of this attention to self, agency, and engagement around what is relevant to the student needs to be interpreted as coddling or pandering to ephemeral interests, but rather to beginning where the student is but refusing to leave him there. Such an approach employs not only affective support but critical engagement of each student around his interests. Such a culture encourages each student to discover who they are and what they like to do and to learn how to use the skills and knowledge they acquire in school to problem solve and broaden their opportunities.

We suggest that adults who would be teachers—parents, mentors, school teachers—need to pay close attention to learners’ engagement with the world outside of schools and to the objects (tangible, of course, but also the intangible) of interest they value and want to learn about.

Neurologist Frank Wilson, author of The Hand: How its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, points out that, when our youth are not connected to the work they are doing, not only is it not their work but it is not them. Wilson illustrates his observation about the importance of the emotional connection with examples from his practice. For over 30 years, Wilson treated musicians with hand problems. Sometimes they would tell him stories about how a conductor wanted them to play a piece of music differently than how they wanted it played. When they heard the piece of music the way the conductor wanted them to play it, they would state that the piece they heard was not them.

Given these understandings, the challenge is to create learning environments as places where students feel like what they are doing are authentic experiences, validate who they are and who they wish to become. The dissonance between students and the curriculum is substantial and a significant barrier to learning. Teachers tried to convince students that this dissonance is part of what learning is all about. Many students, some of them dropouts, discover the fraud while still in school. Others do not discover it until well into or even after college.

Relevance as we use it in Big Picture Schools is influenced by these understandings. They help us to create learning opportunities and learning environments that deeply engage learners and challenge them both intellectually and personally within their areas of interest and beyond. Such engagement through relevance engenders the intrinsic motivation that drives the student to the edge of his competence and to the rigorous yet satisfying learning that eludes so many students.

This increasingly complex and diverse world continually creates new opportunities for success, opportunities that allow each individual student, like Ed Ames, to use his interests to guide his learning and development into adulthood. Schools need to become much more relevant to the world we are coming to and to the students who will live, work, and learn there.

Elliot Washor is cofounder of the Big Picture Company and of the Met School in Providence, Rhode Island.

Charles Mojkowski, a senior associate at Big Picture.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au