Is educational research asking the wrong questions about the enacted curriculum?

I have been lost for a while, reading and re-reading Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Lanier’s book explores the unintended consequences of digital design on human culture, identity and what it is to be human This is a mind altering book, a provocative and powerful book, a book to interrogate, a book that ought to be on every teacher’s professional reading list, especially those of us who pretend to understand and interpret educational technology.  

I am not ready to blog about Lanier’s thinking yet but and as a consequence of reading Lanier I am adopting his list of suggestions for what an individual can do. 

• Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger
• If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don’t yet realise that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
• Create a website that expresses something about you that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
• Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more to create than it takes to view.
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
• If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.

Reading Lanier made me better able to value the thinking in thought piece provided by cj. 

Edwards, R. (2009) Translating the Prescribed into the Enacted Curriculum in College and School Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Edwards’ 2009 paper Translating the Prescribed into the Enacted Curriculum in College and School asks me to think about the curriculum in quite different ways.  His paper contains two case studies to support his thesis that the prescribed curriculum (“in the form of unit descriptors —texts which inscribe the standards that students are meant to achieve”) - become (in)visible in the translations of the practices of curriculum-making and the people, spaces and artefacts that are translated in the process.

 

I am exploring a different tack, which assumes that difference and multiplicity is inherent in curriculum-making practices and therefore there is nothing to be explained as such. It is simply the case. This raises questions about the helpfulness of examining curriculum-making drawing upon the typology of the prescribed, described and enacted as it has largely been taken up (Bloomer, 1997). Edwards 2009

 

Edwards looks at curriculum through ANT description. 

Here order and stability are temporary network effects and not inherent in materials or objects. Unlike most framings therefore, ANT does not privilege human consciousness or intention. Both the animate and inanimate are treated as materially equal. The symmetry between inanimate and animate objects in ANT arises because  ‘human powers increasingly derive from the complex interconnections of humans with material objects ... . This means that the human and physical worlds are elaborately intertwined and cannot be analysed separate from each other’ (Urry, 2000, p. 14).

Edwards describes Callon’s classification of the translation process within ANT like interconnections or networks through four moments;

 

1. Problematisation – the inclusions and inclusions allowed in the network
2. Interessement – the practices through which barriers are built between network and not network
3. Enrolment – the practices of alliance within the network
4. Mobilisation

And uses these to understand the ANT network of a standardised curriculum

 

Curriculum-making is multiple precisely because the prescribed curriculum mobilises different networks of actors. Thus, as Mulcahy (1999, p. 97) suggests, lecturers and teachers engage in a ‘strategic juggling of representational ambiguity’ among the varied standards inscribed in the prescribed curriculum of unit descriptors and the like.  Difference and multiplicity in the curriculum is therefore to be expected and described rather than be identified as problematic and explained (away). This raises important educational questions about the status and equivalence of learning outcomes within a standardised curriculum and the type and amount of work that is necessary to exclude multiplicity in the name of standardisation. Edwards 2009

I am enjoying thinking about curriculum in a non-linear way; identifying how problematisation, interessement, enrolment and mobilisation allow me to understand its complexity in new ways.  But I am anxious that I misinterpret ANT and reduce it by my imaginings to yet another theory – all that “is understood as a diverse domain of conceptual and empirical work that explores how the people, objects, practices and ideas come to be organized and ordered in particular ways, while resisting its own authority as yet another reductionist theory” Edwards 2009

Most of all I am excited by the potential of ANT to help better represent e-learning curricula and pedagogy in school and by how arguments Jaron Lanier makes in You are not a Gadget will fit here.

Edwards paper launches with a quote from Latour that I am holding close

To translate is to betray: ambiguity is part of translation. (Latour, 1996, p. 48)

His paper forced me to look carefully at my day job as a curriculum describer and to go back to the beginning to re-examine my assumptions about curriculum.  The italicised content that follows comes from Edwards.

He makes me wonder if our struggle with the enaction of curriculum is doomed to be forever Sisyphean because we misunderstand “difference and multiplicity and the continuously generated effect of the webs of relation within which curriculum networks are located and instead search for reasons, problems and explanation. “  

I read the paper in the context of the New Zealand Curriculum and as I read it led me to ask the following questions. 

Question: Does our New Zealand curriculum prescription “specify certain learning outcomes to be achieved at a specified level within a hierarchical system of assessment”?

Answer: Yes – check out p44 onwards

Question: Does our New Zealand curriculum prescription “also make broad statements about expectations in relation to teaching, learning and assessment practices to achieve those goals, thereby seeming to limit the possibilities for diversity”?

Answer: Yes – p34 to 36 provide examples of this

Question: Do I believe that a “very standardised and rational” curriculum will “in principle enable and support student mobility and the portability of credit within the education system”?

Answer: Yes I don’t think this unreasonable

 

Question: When it comes to curriculum am I a prescriber, a describer or an enacter?

Answer: I am probably mostly “describer” sometimes “enacter”.

 

Question: How is what I understand about curriculum as a describer similar to what the prescriber or the enacter understands?

Answer: I keep a focus on describing learning outcomes which is something both prescribers and enacters purport to value.

 

Question: How is what I understand about curriculum as a describer different from what the prescriber or the enacter understands?

Answer: The understanding of curriculum can stray into blame based interpretations of outcomes based on “who students are” and “what teachers do” – I try to keep my description focused on “what students do”  

 

Question: Do I read blogs and websites devoted to curriculum describers - the “often idealised narratives of practice provided by teachers, lecturers and students”?

Answer: All the time

Question: Do I accept that the following factors influence my attempts and the attempts of others to enact the curriculum? 

For example

• contextual e.g. national policy, funding arrangements;

• organisational e.g. nature and size of institution and subject department, styles of management, level and type of resources, locus of decision-making, internal or external assessments;

• curriculum e.g. the ways in which the curriculum is prescribed, nature of the curriculum i.e. academic or vocational;

• micro-political e.g. collegial, hierarchical or individualistic, expectations of students and parents; and

• individual e.g. professional formation and dispositions of lecturers and teachers, student backgrounds and prior experiences
  

Answer: Yes I think I do

 

Question: How much time do I spend in professional learning communities talking, thinking, meeting, completing action research, blogging, and tweeting about these factors?

Answer: More than I wish to share here

 

Question: Is my expectation that this discourse will sort these factors in a way that will improve the enaction of the curriculum?

Answer: As Bauman notes In Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lecture) quoting Havel “hope is not prognostication.” It is, alongside corage and will, a mundane, common weapon that is too seldom used.” So yes it is my expectation.

 

Question: Are my efforts to improve the enacted curriculum in New Zealand  based on a belief that learning outcomes are/ should be the same despite different contexts for and means of developing and demonstrating them.

Answer: I guess so

 

Question: Do I see the curriculum as a “black box” – “as a taken for granted object, bounded by a context which (mis)shapes it in unexpected ways”?

Answer: Given what I have claimed already I must

 

Question: When we research the unexpected ways in New Zealand - why differences in the enacted curriculum occur – do we assume that explanation will help us learn how to control them.

Answer: Yes

 

Question: Is this a warranted assumption?

Answer: Ahhhhh … I don’t know .. I have never really challenged it before

 

Question: Is enacted curriculum research in New Zealand that is framed on explanation, an unwarranted and ultimately unhelpful simplification of a more complex process?

Answer: Arghhhh…

 

Question: Is educational research around the enacted curriculum in New Zealand asking the wrong question/s?

Answer: This is a frightening question to contemplate

 

Instead of looking at the factors that can be positioned to explain differences between the prescribed, described and enacted curriculum to bring about their closer alignment, we need to examine more closely the actors in the multiplicity of curriculum making practices (Fountain, 1999). The emphasis then is on describing closely how things come to be the case without privileging human intention and agency. I am arguing therefore that much of the current shape of debate around these issues is unhelpful, as it suggests a possibility precisely for control and prescription based upon a priori distinctions, which is unavailable due to the heterogeneity and multiplicity of practices.Edwards (2009)

 

Question: Is implementation of the prescribed curriculum (in its enactments (described and enacted curriculum)) in a linear sense an educational fantasy?

Answer: It is possible

 

Question: Is what I do in school to help clarify and thus standardise the learning outcomes in the prescribed curriculum (describing the prescribed curriculum so that it may be “better” enacted) no more than fantasy?

Answer: That the expectations in the day job are no more than fantasy – to accept this is to betray my purpose – but I cannot reject it  

 

Question: Is standardisation of curriculum “an (un)stable and precarious achievement”?

Answer: It is disquieting that after reading Edwards this seems increasingly likely

Comments

[Stephen Downes]

The first objective in a politics of control is to get the subject to accept a lie. To, for example, require them to achieve an objective that is no more than a fantasy. To accept as reliable data that is fiction. Etc.

This is why, when I see situations such as you describe here, I never perceive them as benign.

[Artichoke]

Thanks Stephen, I am wearing my Charles Mackay Black T-shirt today - it just seems kind of appropriate.

I suspect "Extraordinary public delusions and the madness of crowds" will always be with us until we learn that the greatest betrayal lies in what we count as commonsense - for those are the ideas we do not even notice - far less interrogate.

I must get better at looking at the ordinary and accepted, the stuff that runs under the radar, the stuff "we just know and do" in school.

[cj]

Probably not a good time to peek at Latour's reassembling the social. To me, what has always been interesting about curriculum is its multiplicity and the capacity of the various bits to somehow reconcile what to any Martian would be irreconcilable. The policy folk enact it thus.... look for evidence that their enactments more or less match what is happening (down there). Same applies to Principals, teachers, kids, parents. What is so amazing is that it hangs together, kind of. There is good work to be done here but Ed. research is enjoying the god view too much I suspect (we can see what is going on, the poor minions we describe can't).

IMHO Ed research has been v good at providing inscriptions to support this circumstance. It's a bit like, when you live under water, air is something you just can't imagine.

Education (of the formal variety) may be among the last of the social institutions to go through what contemporary media, particularly the press, are "enjoying" at present but it will, eventually. Ed research, like a lot of media research, takes attention from the proliferating incompatabilities of the various enactments that have been apparent for a long time.

[Artichoke]

Stephen writes that 'Translating' (evidence-based) theory into practice is a one-way interaction, where what is really needed is diversity and conversation."

This seems similar in sentiment to "enjoying the god view".

I hadn't thought about this boldly enough to appreciate that what is happening to contemporary media may/will in time likely "happen" to educational research. But I guess that if we eschew explanation and instead embrace complexity/ diversity/ conversation then it democratises (?) research - there are many observers of learning outcomes in education - there are primary and secondary sources as it were

Do you think that in the future educational "research" into the enacted curriculum might be closer to "reality TV" where some Foucault panopticon like surveillance device live streams student learning outcomes along with teacher and student commentary/reflection - leaving conclusions to be drawn by "the studio audience"?

[potenta barbati]

"The first objective in a politics of control is to get the subject to accept a lie. To, for example, require them to achieve an objective that is no more than a fantasy. To accept as reliable data that is fiction. Etc.
This is why, when I see situations such as you describe here, I never perceive them as benign."

Great comment Stephen!

[Custom Term Paper]

The most important thing from my point of view is to accept some lies from time to time.

[Quality Research Services]

The first objective in a political of control is to get the subject to be deplomatic.

[medieval clothing]

excellent conversation, This raises important educational questions about the status and equivalence of learning outcomes within a standardised curriculum and the type and amount of work that is necessary to exclude multiplicity in the name of standardisation

[Jan Seiter]

Sometimes I think our 'curriculum' should be like the pills in Alice in Wonderland; one makes you bigger and one makes you small, and which one you take DEPENDS on what you want at that particular moment...