Beyond the Script: Curriculum as a Way of Being

Curriculum was once a bad word to me. I imagined it as an inert obstacle, a static and lifeless impediment of state-mandated stacks of stale books I was expected to animate, transform, and make meaningful to my students with my teaching wizardry. Being an alternatively certified teacher, I was at a disadvantage, being wholly ignorant of curriculum theory, and the sight of the towering teacher's manuals and textbooks rekindled my aversion to the rote learning of my youth and the tyrannical teachers who dutifully delivered their scripted curricula. I equated curriculum with prescribed content presented robotically and unquestioningly by oppressive and humorless adults.

My conception of curriculum as a top-down, systematically imposed, constraining force shrinking teacher autonomy was hard to shake. But there I was, a novice teacher with this curriculum that I had to teach, and stretching before me was an untraversable chasm between the content and its reception in my students' brains, and it was my job to make learning happen. At first, I viewed myself as simply a human vessel transporting the information from the page to the minds of my students, thinking that only by a pure, clinical, and unpolluted transmission would they successfully receive the content.

So, negating myself, the very self I was expected to be and the self that my hiring principal saw a teacher blossoming from, was set aside and became the robotic vehicle of content like the teachers I thought insufferable as a child. I shudderingly recall the tribulations of my first-year teaching as I shakily recited lessons to an unruly, dysregulated, and completely unmanaged classroom of eager but woefully unmanaged first-graders.

Over-caffeinated and under-slept, every day I did what I naively thought was teaching by frantically regurgitating, nay, READING a lesson during the vanishingly small window of a 7-year-old’s attention span that I managed to capture (often by bribes of free-play), then furiously feeding them worksheets to demonstrate their “learning.” My visions of joyous, spontaneous, illuminating, and inspired teaching and learning evaporated as the reality and enormity of my task sunk in; I felt less like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society and more like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop.

The nervous and manic energy that fueled my first days depleted me to the point that rendered any out-of-school time unproductive. When I wasn’t incompetently “teaching” by day, I was dazedly and deliriously fretting and obsessing about said incompetence by night with the daunting curriculum cackling and taunting my teacher fever dreams. In retrospect, I should have lightened up on myself and listened to the veteran teachers who told me the first year of teaching is about survival, and all you needed to do was get through. However, with the first grade being replete with standardized tests, data demands, and evaluations from administration and the district, I felt increasing pressure to rise above the first-year expectations of simply surviving -- lest I look like the incompetent imposter I was beginning to convince myself I was.

Equally inspiring and frustrating were how some of my fellow Reggio-inspired teachers met these systematic demands and found inventive, student-led, and inquiry-based ways of doing so. What they were doing was nothing short of magic, and from my perspective, its seeming impossibility deflated and maddened me. At times, it seemed their classes were running themselves with students fully immersed, spellbound, in various tasks and occupations as their teacher circulated and documented their “work.” I failed to appreciate the time it took for them to lay the groundwork for such an approach, that classrooms don’t spontaneously govern themselves, and that something was underlying, informing, surrounding, and orchestrating this seemingly otherworldly classroom: its curriculum. Had you told me then that curriculum theory was responsible for what I thought was black magic, I would have refused to believe you.

What transpired in those classrooms was borne of an academic, philosophical, and spiritual understanding of a constructivist philosophy that centers the child's rights, dignity, and personhood in creating classroom conditions that maximize their autonomy to be agents of their education. It shocked my traditional sensibilities to see these Reggio-inspired educators not lecturing from a podium, commanding their students’ whole and rapt attention. Instead, it appeared as if they were one of the students, as they crouched alongside them as an investigative partner.

Though it seemed as if their classrooms were self-sustaining, powered solely by the will and ingenuity of the students, every detail was a carefully considered, intentional choice by the teacher, informed by years of experience, observation, and deep study of the Reggio Emilia curricular approach. Undergirding and guiding the students’ investigations, explorations, and projects is an unwavering reverence for their curiosities and unique individualities that serve as the raw creative materials for teachers to work with to propel them toward self-efficacy and self-actualization.

My first year would have looked different if I had the clarity my current studies afford. I would have prioritized community building and classroom management before dragging reluctant and untamed students through torturous and poorly executed lessons, responding reactively and punitively, and proceeding without a guiding vision, framework, philosophy, or ethic or –what’s the word? Oh yeah, curriculum!

I can’t speak for all first-year emergency-certified teachers without classroom experience, but hindsight and studying curricular approaches informs me that without delving into the theory of curriculum and the specificity of the various forms (which takes at least one semester of grad-level work), one can’t correctly orient themselves to respond skillfully to the contextual demands of their classrooms and society more broadly.

Now that it’s clear that curriculum isn’t a stack of dusty books and encompasses every detail of the learning environment in which the state-mandated curriculum plays but a small part, I realize that the teacher emerges as its most consequential ingredient capable of calibrating the conditions of liberating education. The synergy of a classroom conducted by a teacher whose embodied curricular approach serves the ends of a liberating classroom can effectuate positive change within its students and beyond its four walls.

Curriculum is far from a thing; it is a way of being, and serious practitioners (including myself) must have a foundational moral philosophy and corresponding demonstrable ethics. Teachers need more self-awareness, reflection, and critical self-examination to ascertain pragmatic responses to their classrooms' myriad needs.

Unmoored and tossed about in a sea of reactivity, teachers without a clear sense of self can’t reasonably enact a curricular approach of any consequence. This requires discerning and learned teachers who are well-versed in the best approach for whom and when. Considering the consequentiality of teaching and its potential ill effects on their students and, by extension, society, it would behoove teachers to develop, deepen, and expand their understanding of curriculum theories so that they might be able to optimize their role as moral, spiritual, and academic guides whose goal is to influence children to become critically thinking, independent-minded, agents of justice and truth and defenders of democracy. This is not an impossibility nor a quixotic expectation of what every good teacher should be, but it is a path. Though its perfection may be unattainable, teachers who seek it will never fail themselves or their students.

Excerpted from: Curriculum Narrative from CIED-5053-30477 Curriculum Issues, Spring 2024