Curriculum mapping: Responses

Curriculum mapping (CM) is, as you see in my last post, a very complex process of thinking and communicating. Between comparisons to tool belts and medical meetings, it also varies greatly in interpretation once implemented. So I have to ask myself at this point - what do I think of it? What do my colleagues at the Charter think? What does CM really mean for the practice of teaching?

Let me start, perhaps, with the analogies. The first one in Getting Results compares CM to a tool belt that the teacher wears, armed with the hammer of content that nails in the necessary standards with drilling questions and screwdrivers that (how?) turn content into knowledge. I have to be upfront and say I'm not at all enamored by this comparison. To me, this image only maintains traditional notions of knowledge as external from students' bodies and minds, and of curriculum as an objective on the part of the teacher to get as much knowledge from the outside into the students. Apparently with drills and screwdrivers. That sounds worse than the dentist to me.

Jacobs' comparison to medical care is a bit more intriguing to me. (I have two parents in health care who always wonder at how, of the four children between them, none has come close to going into health care. I've realized over time that, as an educator, I may have come the closest.) In schools, as in the world of medicine, "decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient's [student's] needs." She present CM as a hub for cumulative decision making among teachers, demanding a reorganization of teacher meetings around what students need to successfully navigate and reach each benchmark along the way to fulfilling learning standards. I can go further with this analogy, but am left wondering: I can see how such demands of CM can help re-focus teachers on the fact that they teach children before curriculum, but I don't see how CM is making it possible for the day-to-day curriculum to serve and engage the children more directly in their learning.

I think this is a crucial break point between the Charter and other public schools, as far as I can tell. CM may help teachers re-think what and how they are teaching, but it seems to be primarily a tool for a learning community of teachers, not for collaborative learning among teachers and their students.

When we met today at the Charter with Louise to discuss our impressions of CM, our own analogies emerged, gradually wrapping closer and closer around an examination of what purpose maps have in the context of a classroom.

I feel the need to check in with myself about how project questions are evolving. I'm looking for some kind of binder, for example, or some way of organizing how a project evolves.

But the map is not there to prevent us from getting lost. Getting lost is an important part of the process.

Maybe it's not getting lost, but being alive and creative and immersed in what's going on in the classroom.

But I feel the need for something that helps name what you're doing, so that you're understanding it as you're living it.

If we think of it like hiking, the map is the thing we use to keep from getting lost, but when you have that third thing - the magic of emergent curriculum in the moment - you feel you can take the risk of the path that is not on the map.

But there are two kinds of "lost" - there's getting lost in wonder and challenge, and there's also an unproductive lost.

Within this analogy, I began wondering whether mapping is an activity in which we plan curriculum from a preconceived guide - like planning a hiking route according to a map of the area - or as the process of making the map for a piece of uncharted terrain. The question is, then, who is making the map?

As the session continued, I began to realize that the greatest challenge CM faces us with at the Charter is that it is an idea that was conceptualized in a paradigm - the paradigm - that we are trying to move away from. However, in this challenge lies its greatest potential: as one of my colleagues commented:

I feel like, in the work that we are doing, because we represent a paradigm shift in our fundamental ideas about education, we are mapping in this new paradigm, moving from the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge - once we shift our concept of knowledge, we shift everything else, including planning, assessment, etc. We have to bring people all the way there, including ourselves.

I left our day together with Louise re-grounded, to continue the analogy, in the terrain I find myself on here at the Charter. I have to believe that, because we are mapping within a new paradigm, we are, indeed, the map-makers of our curricula; indeed, we are re-imagining what curriculum can be. Yet, even though I would never have imagined taking on such a task, I know I am not alone. All of us here are making our maps - sometimes with each other, mostly with our students, and always in a communal sense of adventure across the school.

Finally, I wonder if we didn't begin to uncover one of the secrets of this new paradigm today. My colleague above described "moving form the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge", which relates back to my lack of satisfaction with the analogy of the tool belt. If we choose to take on curriculum mapping in an educational paradigm, in which knowledge comes first from within the individual, and grows through experience with the world and exchange in community, then our first lesson seems to be this: Not only are we the map-makers, notating our observations of unknown ground, we - with our students - are imagining the terrain into being to begin with.