ABSTRACT
I’ll define curriculum simply. Let’s call it what children experience in
school. In the case of the phonics program, the curriculum came from pub-
lishers who made a sale to the district. Those publishers provided inservice
programs for the teachers, produced materials, and delivered those materi-
als to the children via the teacher. The curriculum came from far away. It
came from a publisher that made generalizations about how the children in
Karen’s classroom should spend their time. The publisher’s view of cur-
riculum is one that views the child as empty, the curriculum as the stuff of
what must be put into the child, and the teacher as the conduit that delivers
the material from the publisher to the child. It is a view of curriculum that
circumvents teacher thinking, child thinking, and unique classroom expe-
to
Dewey (1938) discussed curriculum as something that needs to develop
locally, even as locally as the classroom, so that teachers and students have
input:
Dewey’s view of curriculum is not available to Karen or her students
when a view of curriculum is adopted within a mandated program. They
were subjected to a curriculum that was put in place in response to a manu-
factured crisis (Berliner & Biddle, 1995) at the national, state, and local
levels. In Karen’s situation, the “plan” could have been “cooperative.” In
the past, it was. The plan could have included the “social intelligence”
about reading with which Karen’s children arrive at school. In the past, it
was.
