The draft NZ Curriculum, 150 word comment boxes, and the only existing nude photo of Mark Twain

Smithers:  Look at all the wonderful things you have, Mr. Burns: King Arthur's Excalibur, the only existing nude photo of Mark Twain, and that rare first draft of the constitution with the word "suckers" in it. The Simpsons 1989

I want to look at 20th Century approaches to creating a curriculum for 21st Century learners. I want to suggest that the process we have chosen to create a curriculum in New Zealand ensures that we are unlikely to ever achieve what we claim to desire, a curriculum that will meet the future learning needs of the 21st Century Learner. 

A key Government goal is the transformation of New Zealand into a knowledge- based economy and society.  We need to do this in a way that is distinctive to New Zealand and to ensure that all New Zealanders have a stake in the process, both now and in the future. Education will make a vital contribution to this transformation.

The publication of this draft New Zealand Curriculum gives you the opportunity to engage in discussions about the future learning needs of all students. Hon Steve Maharey Minister of Education. The New Zealand Curriculum Draft for Consultation

Schools across New Zealand are taking a day out from all that teaching and learning stuff to “engage in discussions” about the draft curriculum, with the expectation that they provide any "feedback by 30 November 2006.” 

Given the fact that this document is purported to be a co-construction –

So far, more than 15 000 students, teachers, principals, advisers, and academics have contributed to developing the draft New Zealand curriculum, building on the recommendations from the New Zealand Curriculum Stocktake Report, published in April 2003.  People have contributed by participating in working groups, providing input online, or taking part in focus groups. Developing the draft curriculum

there is an interesting lack of ownership and confidence in schools I visit about the draft discussion. 

Many schools seem bent on bringing in “outside help” to tell their teachers what the new curriculum means on this day rather than spending the day grappling with the big issues themselves. Note to self: There is a whole new income stream for the purveyors of educational snake oil in this initiative.

I did fret a little over what bringing in the expert to interpret the document would mean in terms of the representative quality and diversity of feedback until I found the “official feedback questionnaire”.  It is a classic Initiation Response Evaluation document designed to ensure that any feedback fits within MoE prescribed frameworks, is easy to analyse and only allows for feedback ideas that can be framed within an 150 word limit.

Please Note

•    Section A is compulsory, so please fill in all questions.
•    You may select the questions you wish to respond to in Sections B and C.
•    The comment boxes have a word limit of 150 words.

This questionnaire format of soliciting feedback to inform the draft NZ curriculum, is a 20th century approach to building an education system for the 21st Century learner.

Leftein’s ideas helped me understand the imbalance in the already constructed roles a questionnaire brings to dialogue over the draft curriculum. 

The MoE is vested with epistemological authority wrt the new curriculum – the “draft” curriculum ideas collected from the 15 000 invited to contribute to focus groups etc have been officially authorized by MoE curriculum experts and editors. The MoE has controlled the process and the text, producing a “look at the wonderful things you have Mr Burns” hard copy with glossy colour cover, ISBN number 0 7903 1519X and PDF ISBN 0 7903 1521 1, all copyrighted to the Crown. 

And then, well then to advise this copyrighted “draft” - the MoE produces the questionnaire with compulsory section one to advise the draft.  No wonder some schools are made anxious by the invitation to take part in a dialogue over the curriculum and are choosing to rely on the interpretations of invited others.

You are real good at kneecapping stuff Arti” but what have you got as an alternative way to create curriculum?

Dunno, I am still captured by the ideas from James Boyle Duke University - A closed mind about an open world August 7 2006 Boyle states

Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the past 15 years.

You have to design a global computer network. One group of scientists describes a system that is fundamentally open – open protocols and systems so anyone could connect to it and offer information or products to the world. Another group – scholars, businessmen, bureaucrats – points out the problems. Anyone could connect to it. They could do anything. There would be porn, piracy, viruses and spam. Terrorists could put up videos glorifying themselves. Your activist neighbour could compete with The New York Times in documenting the Iraq war. Better to have a well-managed system, in which official approval is required to put up a site; where only a few actions are permitted; where most of us are merely recipients of information; where spam, viruses, piracy (and innovation and anonymous speech) are impossible. Which would you have picked?

Set yourself the task of producing the greatest reference work the world has ever seen. It must cover everything from the best Thai food in Raleigh to the annual rice production of Thailand, the best places to see blue whales to the history of the Blue Dog Coalition. Would you create a massive organisation of paid experts with layers of editors producing tomes that are controlled by copyright and trademark? Or would you wait for hobbyists, scientists and volunteer encyclopedists to produce, and search engines to organise, a cornucopia of information? I know which way I would have bet in 1991. But I also know that the last time I consulted an encyclopedia was in 1998.

Try this same thing wrt the New Zealand curriculum …

Set yourself the task of producing the educational curriculum for the 21st Century for a country determined to transform itself into a knowledge based economy and society. A country determined to do this in a way that is distinctive to New Zealand and to ensure that all New Zealanders have a stake in the process, both now and in the future. Would you create a massive organization of paid experts to consult widely and then produce a document that is controlled by copyright?  Or would you wait for people from across New Zealander and elsewhere to produce, and search engines to organize, a cornucopia of a curriculum for the 21st Century learner? 

Seems that despite the rhetoric in the New Zealand MoE’s “Enabling the 21st Century Learner e learning action plan” – we are not using 21st Century e Learning approaches to transform the way we develop curriculum in New Zealand.

Boyle’s thinking has allowed me to realise that we are ignoring the evidence from the past 12 years from the internet in our approach to curriculum design.  It could be simply as Boyle suggests that we see only the potential of closedness and the dangers of openness.  It could be that no one has challenged the fact that we are allowing the anxiety of the established players in curriculum development to limit the possibilities for the future. 

One thing is for sure, our approach to curriculum design in New Zealand shows that as Boyle suggests "we are unable to see clearly the potential of the commons based communication approaches to produce interesting and invaluable content".

This is sad for two reasons
1.    Continuing to use closed (non dialogic) approaches to building curriculum are likely to give us curricula that continue to fail to transform education and New Zealand for the 21st Century. 
2.     In the wobbly isles we like to think of ourselves as innovative thinkers (#8 wire stuff), and despite all the glossy documentation, Teemu’s question to the FLNW group pasted below shows that we have missed a chance to lead the way on authentic 21st learner curriculum reform  .. just as well we were not entrusted with developing a world class encyclopedia 12 years ago 

I was yesterday in a seminar arranged by the Finnish MInistry of Education and with several people we discussed if we could put the latest national curriculum on a Wiki so that anyone (well you must at first study the language) may improve it. This "improved" document could then be the bases for the next curriculum.

Have any of you heard about similar kind of project in some other country? I know that the South African national curriculum is in the Wiki Books but is it used to "improve" it or is it just there for people to have a look?

    - Teemu

Comments

[Tony Forster]

Wiki is the way to go if you really want community ownership. These are not curriculum docs but see http://gamelearning.wikispaces.com
http://pdchandler.wikispaces.com
http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com

[Bill Kerr]

hi arti,
What is a curriculum? If a "curriculum" was developed collaboratively on a wiki then would you still call it a curriculum? I see curriculum as the control mechanism that central authorities won't give up. Not sure whether I can be bothered trying to reclaim "their" word.

Nevertheless, Wikipedia still seems to be an encyclopedia despite being wiki based. So maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here? But curriculum seems to be a School based word, rather than a Learning word. If you put a motor in a carriage, it's then called a car, so I might be on to something. Or, if an enlightened monk had used a printing press to churn out simulations of hand written bibles, then would that have delayed the separation of Church and State? Will the schools of the future, if they are still called schools, have a curriculum or will they just be Learning environments, or some such thing?

[cj]

OK I'll bite. And the Boyle is one interesting guy. Trouble is when you point out that the emperor is nekkid, emperors typically don't take too kindly to it.

While I'd argue that the so-called web2 stuff is significant, it is not a warrant to recommit the mistkaes we've made around these technologies for the past 30 years, i.e. begin with the technology.

To me the key question is where is the knowledge located/produced these days. Michael Young, the grand father of the (then) new sociology of knowledge argued in a seminal paper that the real hubs of new knowledge work are specialist communities. The paper presents a withering critique of the conservatives (neo cons in common parlance) and the instrumentalists (lets get relevant, relevant... can't you hear Olivia Newton-John signing?). His argument for a socially relaist curriculum has much to recommend it.

So back to Wikis etc. and sure it is a much easier way to do the collab/communication stuff but with whom? Using them to perpetuate forms of knowledge that only reside in schools is just dumb, dumb, as Boyle would suggest, in a richly textured and patterned way.

Rob Moore & Young, Michael (2001) Knowledge and the Curriculum in the Sociology of Education: towards a reconceptualisation, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22, 4, 445-461.

[Artichoke]

Ahh Bill I know in my head that I should let go of schools and notions of curriculum but in my heart I still want them to work.

I am in Jamie Boyle speak “ a producer and purveyor of whale oil for lamps” being asked to arbitrate on whether “electricity” should be legally allowed into the market.

I want schools to work and I want curriculum to be there for all the teachers who are paralysed by uncertainty and for all the teachers who are paralysed by certainty.

I want the ones who can feel their digits to have the ability to make their own rules.

I am not ready to let go, …. or perhaps I am – I visited an alternative secondary school – a school without walls – smack in the middle of a large city in the holidays - I have to defer judgement and go back when the kids are there – but what I saw was in reality a much muted version of what was already happening at Auckland Metropolitan College in Auckland when I was teaching there twenty years ago. I was so disappointed at the reality of what had been promised as 21st Century innovation, that I didn't feel like there was any real hope for reinventing schools.

I am so very tired of waiting for others to get the hang of this – My excuse is that I have tried to do this once before [not that I would do it the same way now] but after a whole year of consultation and planning and consultation and planning and consultation and planning we failed to get ministerial approval for a designated character 7am to 7pm middle school for gifted students school so I feel a little cynical - like this whole create a new way of doing school is futile endeavour –

But ...and I know this is 3 wine Sidorkian dialogue talking here ... at ULearn06 we talked into the dawn about collecting together a group of educators open to adventure in teaching and learning and changing in a real way the learning opportunities and experiences for a bunch of kids.

Such a fabulous conversation such an exciting undertaking… so I guess I am still flogging whale oil …

Must check out cj’s KPS schools and the 24-hour school with no traditional classrooms where students use mobile phones and laptops to learn in Sydney 24-hour school

[Artichoke]

“To me the key question is where is the knowledge located/produced these days.” cj

Apart from an inexcusable lapse into Olivia Newton John, I reckon you are ontoit cj, this is a question that works in many different contexts

After reading this I was thinking about Edtech Josie Fraser's post on personalisation and its power to include or exclude learners

“Personalisation has emerged as a key concept in the UK government’s vision for public service sector reform, and facilitating personalisation in seen as crucial to the ongoing development of state provision”.

Fraser identifies
1. Adaptive personalisation which seems to be all about the institutions produced provision and procedures,
2. Customisation which is all about enabling the learner to engage with the institutional provision, and her preferred option
3. Dynamic personalisation when the institution is trying to engage with the learner’s produced knowledge .

She argues that “Currently, when we look at approaches within education, we can see that the discussion is predominately focused on adaptive personalisation (Ferguson, Schmoller, Smith 2004) (for example registration, tracking, identity management) and customisation (Ferguson, Schmoller, Smith 2004) (choice between predetermined elements of provision). While I'm not dismissing the importance of both of these elements, at all, I would say that a discussion of personalisation that stops at customisation is not good enough. What we also have to factor in, if we are serious about supporting their learning and teaching experiences and recognising their differences, needs and preferences is the acknowledgment of and opportunity for dynamic personalisation to take it's place.”

Using your check question helps me realise that it is never going to be real personalisation if the knowledge is located and produced solely by the institution. Which then makes me think differently about all this PLE stuff.

[cj]

Hey Arti, there was a bloke called Freire who was into all this ... didn't call it personalisation. What a great word to kill a simple idea!

And for the record, you are so not sellin' whale oil!

[Artichoke]

Ahh ... Freire,the emporer's wardrobe just gets bigger and bigger

In my role as wardrobe assistant to the wardrobe assistant I have been tracking this "new word" in ict eduspeak in NZ

"Personalisation" - keeps popping up in the blogs of the digerati, in MoE ICT speak and is even mentioned by the Minister in the foreword to the latest in all things ICT - Enabling the 21st Century Learner An e-learning Action Plan for schools 2006 -2010 - but no one ever seems to elaborate exactly what they mean by it - though I gathered it probably did not herald the rise of rampant individualism and the subjugation of the group to the needs of the one.

Fraser's post reveals that we have probably nicked it - seems it is a new power word in the UK.

Personalisation has emerged as a key concept in the UK government’s vision for public service sector reform, and facilitating personalisation is seen as crucial to the ongoing development of state provision under the Labour government.

Within the education sector, the discussion surrounding personalisation is fast approaching critical mass, with personalisation increasingly appearing as a necessary criterion within project and programme specifications, and as the subject of investigation.

Must strap on my Freire filters and keep looking in the wardrobe

[botts]

seems to me the problem starts at the very beginning, in the way that we define the thing we are discussing - education. education has become a thing that is done to us. we develop systems and controls and curriculums to make sure that people are being properly educated and to make sure that the institutions that educate us are accountable for the public monies they spend.

but what if we chucked education as we know it out the window. shut down the schools and sack the teachers and instead rely on the human desire to move away from anarchy to assure that people learn the skills they need to survive in this century and into the next. why do we NEED school? why do we NEED to BE educated? at what point in human evolution was it decided that the individual was incapable of making decisions regarding the learning they required in order to cope with the world in which they reside?

many years ago i went to uni to learn the art of teaching. the lecturer i came to admire most seemed to me to be the perfect teacher. organised, knowledgeable, well spoken, in control, and, initially, spouting all the right words about how teachers would control the learning of students and have well behaved students in properly structured classes. my small, conservative, white, middle class brain liked what it was hearing.

then one day mr brown (as he shall be forever known) talked about the thing he was most passionate about - deschooling society. i was crushed, my favourite person was going all communist kibbutz on me and my small white brain wasn't coping. of course, because i was young and knew everything, i jumped up and down and yelled and called him names and challenged him on his standpoint.

the rather lengthy and often heated discussion that ensued changed my view of education forever. i left the campus late that night a beaten man, thoroughly convinced that my small white brain was in fact small and white and therefore particularly ignorant. i also embarked on a journey to discover what learning and teaching and education really could be about. to discover what the possibilities were that lay outside the government ordered and sanctioned classroom. this journey of discovery is a way of life for me now and i have become that same person i once reviled - a passionate advocate for doing education differently.

i don't think i particularly care that the emperor is nekkid, or even how the emperor feels when he realises he is nekkid. if he is foolish enough to be conned by a man selling invisible thread then what the heck is he doing in charge of educating our people. (please don't read this as sexist - here in WA the emperor is a woman and a complete faffing moron who will either be sacked or assassinated very soon if she keeps opening her mouth and spouting liquid poo poo. her big new direction for education in this state was something to do with banning denim in schools because jeans are somehow to blame for the poor educational standards achieved by kids in government schools - go figure)

"When I wake up in the mornin' light I pull on my jeans and I feel all right I put my blue jeans on, I pull my old blue jeans on I put my blue jeans on..." (keith urban among others)

[cj]

Way too much stuff to comment upon except to say that there is enuff evidence about at present to be exploring, at the very least, different ways of doing schooling which just happens to be a particular interest/passion of mine and quite a lot of other folk scattered about the planet. Not of the burn the schools/sack the teachers kind but given the inability of all these big machines to control much at all (big machines like curriculum, accountability etc) what is possible in the cracks, the nooks, the spots they can't control or get at? In my limited experience, quite a lot.

[Teemu]

Hi,

Thank you for the links to the NZ curriculum consultation website. As far as I know this is actually pretty unique. I haven’t heard about other Ministries doing the consultation online, but I agree with you that the "questionnaire" method looks more like a strategy to make the process to look more open than what it really is. In a way it gives the Ministry the possibility to say afterwards: "But we asked you and this is what you wanted"? The same strategy is often used in software design.

What it comes to Finland, I think here is a language / culture difference, too. In Finnish we do not use the term "curriculum" (latin: course). The Finnish concept "opetussuunnitelman perusteet" (nice! :-) means something like "grounds for teaching plan". There is also the policy that each school must formulate their own "teaching plans" (curriculum) that is then based to the National "common ground document". Many schools are also writing their own "teaching plans" (curriculums) online so that anyone can comment it.

I will report on http://flosse.dicole.org when ... well if... the Finnish national plan will be put on wiki.

[Bill Kerr]

brief response to comment by cj above: "there is enuff evidence about at present to be exploring, at the very least, different ways of doing schooling ..."

following on from political upsurge in the 60s there was a flourishing of alternative "freedom" Schools, with names like Summerhill (AS Neill)

following on from the two way web upsurge in the 00s will there be a flourishing of alternative online "freedom" schools - given that traditional schools are increasingly blocking these freedoms

Why not?

There would seem to be developing a political constituency which is ready and willing to exercise closely related freedoms, for example, The Pirate Party , in Sweden

If these conditions exist already or are about to come into existence:
* parents who would willingly send their students to such a school
* students who would want to attend such a school
* teachers who would want to teach in such a school
* technology which would support the online aims of such a school
* the political will to make such a school happen
* the economic knowledge that would make such a school viable

If these things exist, then won't it happen, sooner or later, preferably sooner? Because people such as us whose numbers are growing daily will decide to make it happen. Because the stifling old fashionedness of traditional school will become unbearable to those who have tasted freedom

it just needs a bit of fleshing out