The way I understand Jerome Bruner’s “spiral curriculum” (195), it is a way at coming at curriculum that I could get behind (I am easily swayed throughout my reading, thinking: “Oh, this would be great;” “Now that’s an idea I would like to try;” etc.). My basis of hope in this model comes from the thought of “intellectual honesty.” The way I read it, intellectual honesty is about letting students come to higher/deeper/more complex knowledge through discovery – the knowledge isn’t forced upon them, isn’t babbled out in the rote of daily assignments, isn’t presented as exhaustive. Repetition as students is important in creating context and familiarity; few things make me more frustrated than isolated learning. Transfer is so important to me, yet I and many others will ask, “How does this transfer to life after high school?”
In my experience, college has been the only “acceptable” step after high school, so the push-back against the Progressives would tend to yield a response that emphasizes the academic value of the requirements in English classes. And for the student not headed for college? There has always been a sense of disappointment, as if I were to watch my daughter refuse to learn to walk. I do not think that is a fair way to think of people and their decisions within their own circumstances. This leads into a few selections from the reading that had me quite irritated at how young people were/are treated.
As the scope of education narrowed from “experience and exploration” toward “general education,” instruction focused on providing opportunity to figure out (or be told) how to adjust to demands of the oncoming, adult world and improving language and communication skills (at least enough to get by in the Army). Now, I’m for a well run military with fully aware and high functioning members, and I recognize that life after high school changes considerably, as do the expectations and demands of an individual. These two options, honestly, seem so limiting in what teachers think their students will become. Some may argue that this is exactly the reason for AP and honors tracking, to make sure that the bright students do not get sucked into simply fitting into the world waiting to use them as cogs, but I would argue that the AP programs limit who is allowed to have access to enriched educational models. In my teaching of Freshman Composition at Utah State, the skills and development of ideas our department wanted to illicit were different than the AP goals. A first year Chemistry or Biology course is going to teach as if the students have no background in the subject. Some would help, but the material gets retaught. Instead of calling it Advanced Placement (a term that creates division to me), how about “an opportunity that some of you have to get college credit early that we just don’t offer everyone at this school”? That term seems just as harsh in defining worth as “Life Adjustment” where you fit in to survive – forget about your own muse's impetus.
I think your point about AP not really preparing students for college is important--it again begs us to consider the delivery of cultural goods, and not only academic skills and knowledge, across a curricula.
ReplyDeleteYour responses here to the life adjustment movement is also interesting. Some Progressives might argue that a curriculum oriented toward life adjustment would attend to broad social as well as individual goals, and that the teaching of basic or vocational skills would be too limiting. Then again, more political interests, as seen in the Basic Issues conference and the like would argue that that is exactly what they would like education to achieve for some students deemed "less capable." Government interests, those of the university English department, and English teacher/education advocates all forward sometimes competing/sometimes interrelated goals for English education.