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Teachers as Curriculum Makers

Teachers as curriculum makers is an image that acknowledges the teacher as a holder, user, and producer of knowledge, a self-directed individual who takes the curriculum as given and negotiates it in active relationship with students to address their needs as learners and, to the extent possible, meet the requirements outlined in stated curriculum documents. Unfortunately, the fields of curriculum and teaching have evolved independent of one another in much the same way as Division B (Curriculum) and Division K (Teaching) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) have developed separately. A similar structural and relational divide is apparent within teacher education and curriculum faculties lodged in departments and colleges of education. Disconnects between the knower and the known have abounded in the educational enterprise as historically conceived. Yet, the fields of curriculum and teaching might not be so estranged if the teacher as curriculum maker image was adopted. After briefly describing the background, this entry addresses the conceptualization and the recent scholarship of teachers as curriculum makers.

Background

The teacher as curriculum maker conceptualization was first introduced to the field of education in 1992 by Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly. But the seed of the idea initially took root in an earlier book authored by Connelly and Clandinin, which was primarily written for a teacher audience. Clandinin and Connelly drew on many sources in developing the image: educational history work involving stability and change, educational philosophyDewey's theory concerning the ends and means of education, and educational leadership, which, like other facets of the literature, positioned teachers as mediators between curriculum documents and student outcomes. Also, the agency Ralph Tyler afforded teachers played a role, as did Joseph Schwab's “practical,” most especially his curriculum commonplaces, which upheld the centrality of the teacher in curriculum deliberations and provided raison d'être for the teacher as curriculum maker image. Connelly and Clandinin's programmatic research, which has sought to understand teachers' knowledge in their own terms and in context, additionally informed the image's creation.

The teacher as curriculum maker image works from the assumption that a classroom space exists within which teachers and students negotiate curriculum unhampered by, though not oblivious to, others' mandates and desires. That space, however, is discretionary, which means that teachers and students need to act as moving forces and seize the possibilities inherent in it. Also, opportunities for maneuvering within the classroom space are influenced by othersfor example, fellow teachers, administrators, school district personnel, staff developers, parents, and policy makerswho also have a shaping effect on classroom experiences. In the space teachers and students mutually carve out, distinctions between the knower and the known fade. So, too, do the means and ends of education merge. As active agents, teachers work as minded professionals guided by their own sensibilities and practical ways of knowing. In a like manner, students actively participate as knowers of their own experiences and producers of their own knowledge, not simply users of codified knowledge, which their teachers receive via a metaphorical conduit and correspondingly transmit to them.

Conceptualization

In Clandinin and Connelly's view, curriculum is more than a planned document or a program of study external to teachers. It is what teachers and students live as they interact with one another, although curriculum guides, textbooks, and other materials play a part. The concept of the teacher as curriculum maker calls attention to the primacy of the teacher in organizing, planning, and orchestrating these interactions because only the teacher is situated at the epicenter of the curricular exchange and encounters students face-to-face. Thus, curriculum is what happenswhat becomes instantiatedin the moments when teaching and learning fuse. Hence, what teachers hold and express as part of their knowingthat is, what they reflect on, build theories about, view as significant, negotiate meanings for, and act upon automatically informs their pedagogical interactions with students. Similarly, students' prior experiences and future desires form part of the curricular mix, as do their relationships with fellow learners. Hence, when a teacher as curriculum maker teaches students, the teacher brings forward his or her knowledge about himself or herself as a teacher, the course content, the milieu in its endless complexity, and his or her knowing of the person at a particular place and time within the student's learning experience. In this space, practical and formal ways of knowing mingle, producing new iterations of practical knowledge that both the teacher and students will call forth in future situations. In this way, the teacher as curriculum maker image resonates with the organic connections between curriculum and life. In engaging curriculum, meaning becomes reconstructed through reflection and leads to growth by teachers and students. Indeed, the teacher as curriculum maker image fuels the very essence of the Deweyan idea of education as reconstruction without end.

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