planning for learning
perspectives on curriculum development
The planning you do reflects your understanding of your work as an English teacher.
What is the relationship between language and learning? What role does English play in the curriculum? Does English have a place in a multidisciplinary environment? What role does English play in the lives of your students? What is the relationship between school literacy practices and the cultural practices in which your students engage outside school?
Secondary school students usually talk about ‘doing’ English, as though it is simply a chore. How would you like them to engage in English? What would your ideal English classroom look like? How would you arrange the desks? What kinds of activities would you promote?
Here are some prompts that may enable you to answer such questions.
(The following prompts to be set up as a series of words that they might highlight and then open up? Something to break linearity…)
 Gallery or Workshop?
Here is an attempt by Ian Reid to describe the kind of classroom he would like to operate. He does this by firstly describing a classroom that is being run along traditional lines. Reflect on your own experience of English teaching. Which scenario best fits your experiences as an English student. What kind of classroom would you like to create? (LINK SCAN)
Outcomes: Portraits or Mugshots?
Outcomes based curriculum is a relatively new phenomenon. In Australia much debate occurred in the early 1990s when outcomes based curriculum was introduced at a national and state level. You may be interested to revisit some articles that were published at that time Terry Hayes saw the challenge in 1994 as one of either using outcomes based curriculum to respond to the diverse range of abilities in any English class (i.e. to create ‘portraits’) or to merely use it as a vehicle for uniformity and standardisation (i.e. to create ‘mugshots’). You may find it useful to read Terry Hayes’ essay. You may also find it useful to read Brenton Doecke’s account of the impact the introduction of the Curriculum and Standards Framework had on his work as a teacher educator . What do you make of his argument about the contradictory purposes of the CSF?
Do you believe that a student’s language development can meaningfully be described in the form of a literacy continuum that charts a student’s ‘typical progression’? Is language and literacy learning best described in linear terms, as though students are always climbing a ladder to higher accomplishments? Or can you think of better metaphors to describe that learning? Peruse examples of ‘outcomes’ curriculum, such as the National Profile and Statement and the Curriculum and Standards Framework, and consider the extent to which they provide frameworks for meaningful curriculum development . Pay close attention to the language of such documents and consider whether you can use this language to justify the activities you devise for students.
The publication of the National Profile and Statement and the Curriculum and Standards Framework was the stimulus for commercial publishers to produce a range of textbooks that were developed according to the ‘outcomes’ specified in such documents. You will find it useful to examine examples of these textbooks.
English: A Cleansing Operation?
Here I am proposing to contrast Britton and Sampson
‘Critical’ Literacy?
Some questions here about the possibility of English teachers effecting social transformation – need to think of best readings – Graham’s STELLA article, perhaps Ann Carmichael ‘Interrogating Racist Texts’ (see whether the latter is on STELLA website, as can’t take two articles from same journal for PDFs though may get away with it if we specified EDF 5436 & 5437). Possibly my own article on ‘critical literacy’ in ETPC, just to signal that Graham and I hold different viewpoints (as opposed to the caricature of our stance that we encountered this year). Also reference to videotape developed by Comber, Jennifer Bryan, et al. The stuff I wrote with Douglas McClenaghan and Helen Parr on using information texts?
Lesson Planning – a technology?
Popkewitz, Barnes quotes
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