Voice

Curriculum studies at best rest on the twin pillars of enlightenment and liberation, knowledge and human freedom. A central requirement of curriculum in a democracy becomes the development of a distinct and singular voice in every student.

Teaching in a democracy is geared toward participation and engagement, and based, then, on a common faith: Every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each an intellectual, [Page 934]emotional, physical, spiritual, signifying, and creative universe.

Central to an education for citizenship, participation, engagement, and democracyan education toward freedomis developing in students and teachers alike the ability to think and speak for themselves. The core curriculum of a liberating education is this: We each have a mind of our own; we are all works-in-progress swimming toward an uncertain and indeterminate shore; we can each join with others in order to act on our own judgments and in our own freedom; human progress is always the result of thoughtful action. Students must learn to grappleboth now and in the futurewith a question central to the spirit and heart of democracy, a question both simple and profound, straightforward and twisty: What's your story? How will you find the voice to tell it fully and fairly?

All human life, of course, is in part a story of suffering and loss and pain. When that pain is preventable, the suffering undeserved, we resist, and in that resistance is another common-place in our human story. Sometimes our stories are ignored or diminished by others, sometimes we are seen through the heavy lenses of stereotypes and labels, our undeniable and indispensable three-dimensionality suffocated and diminished, our hopes handcuffed, and our possibilities flattened and policed. The development of a more powerful and compelling voice becomes even more essential.

It's here that students draw upon their educations, on their own minds and their own spirits, to lift themselves up and beyond the negative and the controlling. What's your story? Who are you in the world? What in the world are your chances and your choices?

Telling our stories, trusting our stories, listening carefully and empathically to the stories of others is part of the work of democracy. Everyone counts, and nobody counts more than anyone else. In a real democracy, the full development of each is the necessary condition for the full development of all. What's your story? How is it like or unlike other stories? What are the next chapters going to be, and the chapters after that, and after that? No one knows for sure, for each person must write those next chaptersand even so, only partially, for every life is also a dance of the dialectic, a sometimes difficult negotiation between chance and choice.

To be a good teacher in this context means above all to have an abiding faith in all students, to believe in the possibility that every person can create things and is capable of both individual and social transformation. Curriculum becomes a form of reinventing, re-creating, and rewriting, of finding voice, and this is a task that can be accomplished only by free subjects, never by inert objects. Curriculum, then, is a dialogical process in which everyone participates actively as equalsa turbulent, raucous, unpredictable, noisy, and participatory affair. The goal of dialogue in this context is critical thinking and actionvoice and knowledge emerge from the continual interaction of reflection and action.

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