What Eisner says early on in the reading about schools offering more than simply class material brings to mind something I learned in my EDUC 401 class last year. In that class, we discussed three different instances of students who were not necessarily acting like "good students" in that they often did not follow school rules nor did they do much work in class. However, we were given context to their situations and in multiple cases, we rationalized as a class that those students were actually acting in ways that would give them the skills they might need for the future (e.g. social relationship building).
Something else this reading brought up for me was the discussion of implicit curricula, which teaches the values that the society values. I've attended school in both the US and Japan, but they're very different. For example, in Japan, the teachers move between classroom as opposed to the students. The students are also expected to help serve lunches as well as clean up the classroom every day. Culturally, doing things for the community is important in Japan and those values are reflected in what students are expected to do. On the other hand, a more extreme example of parents/community getting involved in the US can be seen in legislature such as the bills to try to put the Ten Commandments into every classroom or the bills that try to ban schools from mentioning LGBTQ+ matters.
The explicit curricula that Eisner mentioned is most prominently connected to the BC curriculum through the content learning standards and the big ideas. However, I do think that BC is trying to address the implicit curriculum and some of the values that we are teaching students through their curriculum by including the curricular competencies and the core competencies, which focus much more on what students are expected to do. As for the null curriculum, there are some things that were previously ignored that are now trying to be incorporated (such as First Nations perspectives), but I have heard from current math teachers that actually managing to include First Nations perspectives in their lessons without it feeling cheap is quite difficult.
This was a rich and comparative response that showed you were really engaging with Eisner’s three curricula. I liked how you started with the EDUC 401 example — connecting Eisner’s ideas to students who don’t appear to fit the “good student” mold but who are still developing valuable skills reframes the hidden curriculum in a very concrete way.
ReplyDeleteYour comparison between the US and Japan was excellent. The contrast between Japanese classroom practices (teachers moving, students serving meals and cleaning) and American debates about religion and LGBTQ+ issues in schools powerfully illustrated how implicit curricula reflect wider cultural values. I recommend that you pursue this further.
You also tied the explicit curriculum back to BC clearly and highlighted how competencies try to address implicit lessons. Your recognition of the challenges in authentically including Indigenous perspectives was an important point — it shows you’re aware that attempts to fill gaps in the null curriculum are not always straightforward.
As a next step, you could deepen this reflection by considering who is being asked to do the work of filling gaps in the null curriculum. Too often, the responsibility for authentically incorporating marginalized perspectives falls on teachers or students from those very communities, which can create an additional layer of labor and pressure. Thinking about how schools and systems could provide collective structures of support — so that it isn’t left to the minority to “save the day”.
Fantastic blog entry, Minami!