Hold up, what’s a curriculum, except for literature and learning goals?
There are many different strategies and approaches for building a curriculum or lesson plan. Traditionally a curriculum or lesson plan is outlined in a linear fashion and includes objectives, learning outcomes, and evaluation metrics. There’s many different templates you can find online that vary in degrees of structure and playfulness. Here we’ve collected some philosophical guides on developing curricula or lesson plans
Curricula as story
Starting from concepts and building a story
Starting with concepts
If you consider your curriculum like a map**, with different milestones and view points to reach along the way, its often useful to develop a storyline or narrative that gives a bigger picture or container for the journey. Sometimes it can be as simple as moving through different scales of nature (micro to macro systems) as many text books do, or in a more historical order of discovery. However, if you are teaching concepts from a more archetypal, conceptual or pattern based approach, you may want to get more creative with the map for your course or lesson plan.
Think of a story arch — a beginning, a middle, and an end where every topic leads to the other/is connected. This way, you can choose units on a smaller or larger scale to use the story in different formats: for entire curricula, you can let the story expand, for a single lesson, you can contract it into its most fundamental/concentrated form. This way of creating/conceptualizing classes allows you to follow the arch and build modules that can be tailored for a variety of educational needs
Free-writing exercise: Define your most important keywords and activate their meaning for you. Take five minutes for each term and write everything that comes to mind. Time yourself and highlight the most important elements of your free-writing exercise.
When thinking about key concepts you want to get across in the classroom, take some time to think about how they connect to your ethics/principles of teaching. Before getting into the thick of it, take a step back and reflect on the principles you come to this project/educational experience to. What are the guiding principles that you approach this space and your students with? What do you believe in? What is most important?
You can read more about archetypes and patterns in our essay here
In this syllabus we created for For Love and Science, the goal was to explore concept of fundamental science such as physics, chemistry and biology. A core theme was looking at behaviors and transformations of matter, energy and information. Since we began the course by talking about patterns and archetype, we used the archetypes of the 4 elements, a pattern which has been used in American Indigenous cultures and Greek western philosophy. I (Kendra) was introduced to the medicine wheel by my sister-creator Eutimia Cruz Montoya and through healing and organizing work with the Four Winds American Indian Council in Denver, CO.
Curricula as a House
Starting with Values
“What are the main pillars/key words of your house?”
Nhan Phan
When building a curriculum like a house, a home to hold all this knowledge and collective ideas, it’s useful to start with a value-based approach to build a foundation. Values in the classroom often remain implicit, but they shape a classroom and the experience of learning and teaching. Instead of letting the values in a classroom remain unvoiced, thus unchallenged, or assuming that everybody is automatically going to share the same values, often with the effect that some students are addressed and accommodate while others are not, make them explicit. Break them down, collect keywords, find out what exactly they mean to you, and then, find common ground with your students.
How to start: Making a plan for a curriculum (credits go to Processing fellow, artist, science teacher Nhan Phan). Think of your curriculum as a house
First, define the fundament, then build the pillars, then the roof
→ identify key concepts/key words that make the foundation of your philosophy
→ solidify your philosophy: how do you define those terms for you: write everything out
→ how can you channel these keywords into the project
→ come up with exercises and activities: Example from Teaching as Art: teach a class from your high school → pick a topic that you have some knowledge about
→ resources to facilitate that idea → basis to create that tool
Start with the broadest terms (What is science for me? What is community for me? What is processing for me? Then, move on to more specific terms (What does community processing mean for me?) → this is the foundation of your house.
Example: For this toolkit, some of the building blocks were the following key terms:
Keywords: place/locality, technology (exercises), (ethics and values,) community processing, love, science, environment, relationships and connections
Specific terms:
Place-based learning, love and science, community processing
Free-writing exercise: Define your most important keywords and activate their meaning for you. Take five minutes for each term and write everything that comes to mind. Time yourself and highlight the most important elements of your free-writing exercise.
When thinking about key concepts you want to get across in the classroom, take some time to think about how they connect to your ethics/principles of teaching. Before getting into the thick of it, take a step back and reflect on the principles you come to this project/educational experience with. What are the guiding principles that you approach this space and your students with? What do you believe in? What is most important for your work, what is it grounded in?
Now, let’s look at the pillars that uphold the different levels of your building.
Values
Start with the values you hold up – what is important in this class? What values inform the way you do science and want to do science collectively? First, make yourself aware of your own personal values, the ways in which you enact them and hold them up in this space. What is the grounding that informs your work and what does it look like in the classroom to care about these values (ex: what does it look like to enact or violate integrity, care, mutuality, collective learning, collaboration, personal growth, excellence, sustainability, innovation, etc.)?
Mapping your curriculum
**Disclaimer: Mapping as a practice of science and discovery has a long tradition of controlling, dominating and captivating formerly unknown land (by European settlers), humans, and non-humans. A map flattens land down to a line, a life to a dot. And: maps map beings that do not want to be mapped, and sometimes even cannot be mapped (dragons, magic, the mystery). When we refer to mapping as a practice, we need to be aware of this legacy. At the same time, we want to point to other maps that do not exclusively point to colonialism and a tradition of science making that resulted in exploitation, erasure, and genocide. Those different maps exist and can be conjured, as the Black diasporic author Dionne Brand does in “A Map to the Door of No Return”. And: mapping can be used as a tool and a strategy to demystify places with unspoken rules that that alienate and other certain people, places such as institutions, laboratories, and classrooms that were designed for a certain population of learners –white, English-speaking, schooled in a European tradition. When we use mapping as a device to orient ourselves in places that feel alienating, we want to be careful not to map in a tradition of capture.
