Curriculum

Most of the work we have done in exploring the implications of “cognitive tools,” has been with regard to teaching. We have spent some time developing the frameworks and also designing lesson and unit plans in various degrees of detail. But the general educational theory on which all this is based also has implications for the curriculum.

Usually it is much harder to change curricula than it is to change teaching practices. Most jurisdictions don’t worry too much about what methods teachers use so long as they deliver satisfactory learning—and in this regard IE usually delivers very well indeed. So teachers can adapt and adopt methods with some ease and without much interference. But changing the curriculum is very problematic. One reason concerns the vagueness and contentiousness surrounding aims of education and the curriculum that is supposed to deliver them. One slight oddity of current curriculum revision procedures is that enormously strict requirements are in place to justify any significant change being made. These required justifications could not be given, even by those who require them, for the current curriculum that is in place. So we have conditions ensuring a very conservative curriculum structure, allowing little in the way of significant change.

Even so, the basic theory of IE has implications for changing the curriculum no less than for teaching practices. We want to use this section of our website to explore some of those implications. We will be suggesting some overall curriculum principles deriving from the theory and outline the kind of curriculum these imply.

For example, if we believe that an adequate education involves learning in breadth and depth, as nearly everyone argues, and that the imagination can work only with what someone knows, then we might want to re-think how we ensure that students learn something in depth. Here is a novel and somewhat radical suggestion for how we can introduce a new element to the curriculum that might just do the job. Most people so far have snorted with derision, or just laughed at the idea, but then nearly everyone thinks about it, and concludes it really just might work. Anyway, see what you think by clicking here.

In addition, we would like to mount here curriculum outlines for individual curriculum areas designed by anyone familiar with general theory (so far best described in Egan’s The Educated Mind.

We will begin with an essay on curriculum implications of “Romantic understanding,” for students in the middle-school years. If you are familiar with IE principles already, and just want to get a sense of the “shape” of this Romantic curriculum, you might prefer to see only the summary form. You might, however, want to read the justification and elaboration for each part of the curriculum. Here are two versions:

For the more elaborated version, including detailed justification for the novel form of curriculum, click here.
For the summary version click here.

A similar account of the Mythic curriculum will follow soon.

And we will open up the analysis for implications in particular curriculum areas with an essay by Ms. Heidi Jost, an undergraduate student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education when the paper was written. She looks at the area of Music, and sketches ideas for how the cognitive tools of mythic, romantic and philosophic kinds of understanding can shape teaching in different ways. Click here.