Category: Curriculum Liberation Front

Thoughts about what we do to children in schools, and how we do it.

Media & curriculum

Posted on by Dale

So what is our role in the curriculum, new or otherwise, if we aren’t implementing the ALA’s Information Literacy Standards, mainly because if we try, we’ll be ignored?

Certainly, the good people who wrote the Georgia Performance Standards do not seem to have given it any thought. I find no hint in the GPSs* of standards that recognize even the existence of a trained media professional on the premises, much less of the collaborative planning he is prepared to do with the teachers.

Nor do media specialists seem to have been involved in the fiction-writing process at any level. Surely, if we had been, there would be embedded in this active curriculum some hint that students need to be trained in how to find and use information.

::sigh:: Oh, well.

So what is our role in the curriculum?

*[Incidentally, I’ve been torqued about the term ‘GPS.’ The term itself is plural, but it seemed natural, though idiotic, to add an s to it, I’ve given up on apostrophes, just like we do with the QCCs. In yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, William Safire had the same torquation with WMDs, and his conclusion was that the initials focus on the item, not the number, so adding an s to the term, though syntactically foolish, is OK. Just don’t insist on periods and an apostrophe, like the Times.]

About that T-shirt

Posted on by Dale

If you were brave enough to click on the t-shirt link in Thursday’s post, you already know this: there’s a Curriculum Liberation Front store, and you can own your own CLF coffee mug, or t-shirt, or tote-bag. What can I say? What started as a small joke turned into a great way to waste a Friday night.

But seriously, as I was letting my imagination run riot with all the gear, I began to think that one could use CLF as a humorous way to insert oneself into the curriculum revision process. Imagine, sending a postcard to a grade level chair/dept. chair, that has the logo, the motto (“When knowing stuff is not enough”) and a simple little “The media center invites your cooperation.” And the notecard opens simply to say, “Cooperate.”

You’ve read this a million times, and you should especially read it in your very own copy of Curriculum Partner: redefining the role of the media specialist, by Carol A. Kearney: you must promote yourself as a curriculum partner, relentlessly. As you already know, we’re trained to plan with teachers, but they are not trained to plan with us, so we have to market our services and skills without ceasing. I’m going to use the Curriculum Liberation Front as one tool to get their attention. That, and cookies.

I’ve also decided that if I work real hard in December, I can put my QCC/GPS analysis into book form, and then you can buy your very own copy along with your mug and your boxer shorts. What better way to show the teachers you know what you’re doing and that you mean business? My teachers have already used the charts I’ve done as they’ve been planning units, so I know yours will jump at the chance to work with you and your little “GPS book.” As soon as I’ve gotten them written…

Information Literacy Standards

Posted on by Dale

This just in: Judy Serritella, the very fine Coordinator of Library Media Services, up at the DOE in Educational Technology…and Media [ellipsis added], sent us a link to the ALA’s Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning. It’s downloadable as a PDF file from ALA at http://www.ala.org/aasl/ip_nine.html.

Very complete, very nice, and absolutely necessary document.

And completely irrelevant. Admirable as these standards are, they are completely unaddressed in our GPS curriculum and therefore unassessed. (Hey, that’s good: “What’s unaddressed is unassessed.” I want a t-shirt.) And as we all know, if it ain’t assessed, it ain’t taught. Or as the t-shirt might have it, “What’s unaddressed is unassessed, and vice versa.” Y’all want that in a beefy T or baby doll?

The GPS as structure

Posted on by Dale

I am just beginning to get a sense of the Georgia Performance Standards as a structure that we think will cause learning. Over the past few days, I’ve completed the comparison between the QCCs and GPSs for science and socials studies, K-5, and yesterday I started on the language arts curriculum.

My original intention was simply to find out where the “stuff” went, how much content had actually been changed. I knew already, I thought, that the thrust of the curriculum had changed, that it was somehow designed to permit the teachers and the learners to go more deeply into the topics than the QCCs did. There’s less to cover and more to discover, so to speak.

Here is what I’ve found so far. The GPS curriculum is far more than simply rearranging the stuff we have to teach. It is more than simply throwing out half the QCC objectives. What we have here is a true structure within which learning can occur.

The QCC was simply a laundry list of objectives. The GPS is an organized structure of standards. The GPS is more specific about what we want students to be able to do with the knowledge we think they should have, while at the same time being a lot more spare with that knowledge.

For example, in social studies, history is now supreme, and economics, geography, and civics (although listed separately) are embedded in the study of U.S. history. In 3rd grade, students will discuss the lives of Americans who expanded people’s rights and freedoms in a democracy [SS3H2]. The following are listed: Paul Revere (independence), Frederick Douglass (civil rights), Susan B. Anthony (women’s rights), Mary McLeod Bethune (education), Franklin D. Roosevelt (New Deal & World War II), Eleanor Roosevelt (United Nations & human rights),Thurgood Marshall (civil rights), Lyndon B. Johnson (Great Society & voting rights), and Cesar Chavez (worker’s rights).

Here’s what I think is true about this curriculum: it will not be sufficient to assign this list of people to your class to do “reports,” including a “visual aid.” That short list of people has embedded in it an entire study of the time periods and social forces with which they contended. Viz., SS3H2.b, which states that the student will “explain social barriers, restrictions, and obstacles that these historical figures had to overcome, and describe how they overcame them.”

Before we even get to talking about how the media center fits into all this, I’d like to see if anyone else is curious as to how we assess (i.e., get a grade for the computer) that standard, “students will discuss…” And what will the CRCT look like? Because if the CRCT is nothing more than identifying Mary McLeod Bethune, the whole purpose of the GPS will be undercut.

“Uses the media center…”

Posted on by Dale

Remember the QCC objective, somewhere in Language Arts, Reference/Study, that says, “Uses media center and available technology as sources of information and pleasure”?

That is no longer in the GPS curriculum in any way, shape, or form.

Yes!! Sweet freedom! We can lock the doors, read our magazines, and eat bon-bons! All we have to do now is convince the teachers that the 1,000,000-word reading goal can be met from their combined textbook selections.

Integrating the media center into the new curriculum may be harder than we have hitherto supposed.

Reviewing the QCCs

Posted on by Dale

Oh my stars! I’ve embarked on a huge project, about which I’ll write lots later on, of comparing the QCCs to the GPSs. I’ve finished science and am starting on the social studies curriculum, and I just want to state for the record that the QCCs were an unbelievable mess! Not that we didn’t already know that, but when you have to go over it with a fine-tooth comb to see how the topics were distributed anew, you can really see how incoherent it all was.


Here’s the 5th grade physical science curriculum, with the old QCCs on the left and the new GPSs on the right. One huge chunk, motion and force, has been moved to 4th grade; and electricity/magnetism has been moved up. In both, several old QCC objectives have been dropped.

Curriculum and the two views

Posted on by Dale

If we’ve agreed that curriculum is that structure we think will cause learning, and I guess we have, since no one has left any comments to the contrary on my previous posts, then it should be pretty clear where our two views of learning, our two systems of memory, fit into the picture.

If we think that learning is a basic set of facts to memorize, then the structure of our learning will be long compilations of all the things we need to know. Actually, let’s call it the things we think children need to know. Quick, what’s the valence of carbon? What, you don’t know that? I bet you learned it. Why don’t you know it?

If we think that learning is a construction process, then our curriculum ought to be a set of knowledge goals centered around providing opportunities to construct that knowledge.

Clearly, of course, our curriculum must be a combination of these two views. There are some things we just have to know: the alphabet, addition facts, the names of the states, etc., etc. Where it breaks down is when we have to agree on the limits of that knowledge. This breakdown is what leads to all kinds of compromise and to 23-year curricula like the QCC. I mean, if we don’t teach them the causes and effects of the Alien and Sedition Acts (or, as my son refers to them, “Patriot Act 1.0”), then how will they know it? I can feel the panic rising even as we think about it.

One of the goals of the GPS was to simplify, to reduce the sheer number of things we had to make sure the children memorized, to try get the curriculum down to the thirteen years we actually have the children captive.

Another of its goals, if I understand it correctly, is to provide a structure for students to begin to construct actual knowledge that is deep, meaningful, accurate, and longlasting.

So… does it do that? And if it does, what does that mean for media specialists?

So #2 is better?

Posted on by Dale

If we think that knowledge/learning is a process, a construction of information by the learner, and I do, then can we defend it as being better than rote memorization of discrete bunches of facts?

Not really. As I said a couple of posts ago, the world is divided, and this where agreement on how to teach the children falls apart.

However, the difference between taxon memory and locale memory should give us all pause before casting our lot with the memorization crowd. Here’s a quick question: what did you have for supper last night? Most people have little problem answering that question (unless it was a fifth of Johnny Walker), and yet none of us sat down and memorized that fact for retrieval today. How do we do it?

The answer is locale memory, which is one of our built-in learning systems. It’s survival-based and map-oriented, and it’s omnipresent. We don’t have to work at it. It works through all our senses as well as our emotions to sort information into sensible patterns that will help us live to the next meal.

Our locale memory forms its maps fairly instantaneously. Can you imagine how hard it would be to survive if every time you went into a new room you had to use trial and error to figure out how to get back out? That’s what makes the characters in the computer game The Sims so hysterical: they have no locale memory, it’s all taxon. Before they can learn the simplest things, like how to get out of bed, they have to do it over and over and over.

Complex maps take time to construct however. You have to live in an area for a while before you know all the “back ways” to get to where you want to go. If you’re learning a new piece of software, you now how frustrating it is to be tied to the manual or a Dummies book every time you want to accomplish something. But after a while, you know all the keyboard shortcuts and what all the tools are for and what’s hidden in all the submenus and palettes.

So what’s all this got to do with curriculum in general and with our new GPS curriculum in particular? Good question.

View #1: further thoughts

Posted on by Dale

View #1 of knowledge/learning is that it’s made up of a set of discrete facts that it’s the student’s duty to learn and the teacher’s duty to teach.

One of the problems, as stated in this morning’s post, is that this kind of teaching/learning relies heavily on taxon memory. There’s nothing wrong with taxon learning at all. It’s durable, reliable, and long-lasting, once you get it into your brain.

That’s the problem, though, because it’s very, very hard to get that kind of information into the brain. Our brain perceives bits of taxon information as irrelevant to its purposes, and resists the memorization. As my son so famously said about the multiplication tables, “When will I ever use that?” So learning in that manner requires a great deal of concentration and repetition to engrave that information into the synapses.

The benefits are that if you truly learn something this way, it’s yours forever. The multiplication tables is a great example of this. State capitals, the Presidents in order, and the Pledge of Allegiance are others.

The downside is that not only does the brain resist learning this way, it requires external motivation to do so. And external motivation eventually depresses the brain’s intrinsic desire to learn. I think most of us can give plenty of examples of how, starting in third grade and certainly by fifth grade, the natural curiosity of the first grader is almost completely gone, as far as our curriculum is concerned.

So why have we relied so much on this kind of learning in the past? Hint: it’s easy to test. And because it’s easy to test, it produces numbers that look oh-so-objective, and where would our policy makers be without objective accountability? But the long-term outlook for people who are required to learn mainly through the use of taxon memory is that they don’t end up with brains that look on the world as a set of ever-changing patterns that need to be recognized and dealt with.

Quick: how many kingdoms of living things are there? Can you name them? Are you sure they haven’t changed since last week?

See the problem with an overreliance on View #1? You can’t regard knowledge as a set of discrete facts that are set in stone, eternal truths if you will, because facts change and then you’re stuck with the wrong information in your head.

Two views of knowledge

Posted on by Dale

Here’s another idea to get out there right here at the beginning: there are two basic views of what knowledge/learning is all about.

The first is that knowledge/learning is a set of true things (facts, you might be tempted to call them) that are true things everyone needs to know. It is the teacher’s job to get those true things into the head of the child so that the child can be an educated person. Because without knowing those true things, one can never be a functioning member of a great democracy.

The second view is that knowledge/learning is a process. The learner constructs knowledge, as someone (I think it was me) once said, and that construction goes on all the time. It is the teacher’s job to manage that construction so that the child is learning things we have chosen to write into the curriculum, rather than those things the better-funded and more focused corporate world has chosen.

The two views are complementary, of course, but where we sometimes find conflict is when those who believe in View #1 think that View #2 is just fuzzy, feel-good liberal hogwash. Yes, it’s true, the proponents of View #1 tend to be conservatives, with a focused worldview of the way things are ‘sposed to be: back in their day, student sat in rows, quietly, didn’t give no backtalk, and they by God learned 100 facts about the Civil War every day. Plus ciphering.

The problem is that View #1 tends to produce very low level learning, simple recall of extraneous facts that don’t stick. Everyone knows how to cram for a test so that the information sticks just long enough to be regurgitated back onto the test. It’s a very hard way to learn, and it’s not very effective. It’s called taxon memory, and it works by repetition. Simply scratch hard enough and long enough, and you can engrave the 100 facts about the Civil War onto the hard surface of the brain.

Here’s an image I’d like for us to disseminate: whenever someone uses the well-worn phrase regurgitating facts, let’s respond with just like a cat hacking up a hairball.

Disclaimer: There’s nothing wrong with learning facts, taxon memory is essential to our learning processes, and not all people who vote for John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld share their limited view of how an educated person gets that way.

Enough for today. More thoughts on View #1 this afternoon.