This is a continuation of a series of posts on summaries of articles, mainly on education.
When I was a French teacher at Ashern Central School, in Ashern, Manitoba, Canada, I started to place critiques, mainly (although not entirely) of the current school system. At first, I merely printed off the articles, but then I started to provide a summary of the article along with the article. I placed the summaries along with the articles in a binder (and, eventually, binders), and I placed the binder in the staff lounge.
As chair of the Equity and Justice Committee for Lakeshore Teachers’ Association of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS), I also sent the articles and summary to the Ning of the MTS (a ning is “an online platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks”).
As I pointed out in a previous post, it is necessary for the radical left to use every opportunity to question the legitimacy of existing institutions.
The attached article for the ESJ Ning is prefaced by the following:
Hello again, everyone,Another article sent to the ESJ Ning is attached. It is prefaced by the following:Jean Young, author of the article, “Teacher Participation in Curriculum Decision Making: An Organizational Dilemma,” provides an astute analysis of the problem of teachers participating in the formulation of curriculum.Rather than summarize the article, though, I simply will point out that teachers’ participation in formulation of the centralized curriculum, according to the author, simply does not work in actually having teachers formulate curriculum since the teachers’ primary focus is then pedagogy, not curriculum formulation in relation to pedagogy. In such a situation, it is the permanent curriculum participants, such as superintendents or curriculum experts, who provide the structure and content for the curriculum. Teachers are then left to merely execute the curriculum.Many teachers prefer this system as opposed to participation in the curriculum since that is where they have their power.To rectify the situation, it is necessary to decentralize the curriculum to the school level. Obviously, if this were done, it would be necessary to modify pedagogical tasks so that the workload would not increase as a result.Until teachers start taking the initiative in criticizing the curriculum structure, their professional status will be limited in many ways to their pedagogical expertise. This is less the case at the secondary level, but secondary teachers are still subject to the control of curriculum experts and school bureaucrats.To become more professional, teachers would have to engage in struggle for control over the curriculum. Judging from the current lack of militancy among Manitoba teachers, it is unlikely in the near future that there will be change in that direction. However, if an economic crisis hits Canada the way it has hit many other countries, teachers can expect an increase in attacks on their working conditions. Indeed, Manitoba teachers seem to have been beaten on at least one front without even putting up a fight: outcome-based education is now province-wide. Manitoba teachers, through their lack of attention to the issue of the curriculum, are now facing increased control over their teaching lives in schools through the possible use of outcome-based education—to evaluate their performance. That is what Charlotte Danielson and others have been used for by administrators.Teachers do need to wake up to the importance of curriculum for their work—or they may well find that they have become mere puppets for educational administrators and bureaucrats.
The Abolitionary 