Affected Clapping

In 2.1 I began identifying the resources each school has at their disposal. One I failed to write about is something often referred to as the “curriculum”.

But what is a curriculum, in the context of high schools?

When I talk about curriculums found in high schools I’m talking about pre-selected, pre-formatted hierarchies of information within various disciplines (or subjects).
So let’s apply that extremely dense sentence to High School Social Studies.
There’s two ways of analyzing how a state mandates curriculum:

• What goes in (what’s the knowledge that needs to be taught in every classroom, according to the state)
• What goes out (how is this knowledge assessed to make sure that students have retained the necessary information and can build upon it)

I spent some time this morning looking more closely at New York State standards for Social Studies, which can be boiled down into “5 Key Standards”.

Standard 1: History of the United States and New York
Use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas, eras, themes, developments, and turning points in the history of the United States and New York.

Standard 2: World History
Use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas, eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history from a variety of perspectives.

Standard 3: Geography
Use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of the geography of the interdependent world in which we live—local, national, and global—including the distribution of people, places, and environments over the Earth’s surface.

Standard 4: Economics
Use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of how the United States and other societies develop economic systems and associated institutions to allocate scarce resources, how major decision-making units function in the U.S. and other national economies, and how an economy solves the scarcity problem through market and nonmarket mechanisms.

Standard 5: Civics, Citizenship, and Government
Use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of the necessity for establishing governments; the governmental system of the U.S. and other nations; the U.S. Constitution; the basic civic values of American constitutional democracy; and the roles, rights, and responsibilities of citizenship, including avenues of participation.

Each of these standards has key ideas that go into more specificity. If you’d like to examine them closer you can HERE.

So that’s what “goes in”. That’s the end-goal. Schools, ostensibly, want to produce citizens who are knowledgeable about the society they live in.

What “goes out”?

How do we assess whether we’ve been successful, in the eyes of the State?

Why, a standardized test of course. Don’t worry, they’re all online, as I’m sure your idea of nice Sunday is perusing a NY State Regents Exam in US and/or Global History. You can check out some of the tests here.

But I’m less interested in discussing standardized tests today than I am dissecting the means with which we prepare students to becoming global citizens, and changing the way we think about the word “curriculum”.

We know the tools educators currently have at their disposal to use in the traditional, top-down model of teaching students (for a comparison of top-down models and bottom-up models, see Part 1 of Open-Source Education here.

Boiled down, those tools (when we stay in SS arena) would be:
• Textbooks
• Internet
• Teacher Knowledge (gained from their Undergrad and Masters educations)

If you think of textbooks as content delivery systems, which is what they inherently are, it’s hard to not see them as the most out-dated “tool” in any classroom. And if textbooks are “outdated”, than the way classrooms (well, some classrooms) use the Internet is outdated as well. Teachers often use the Internet as a crutch, an online textbook. In a way it is, but if we’re simply pointing a student to a website with a bunch of content about a particular topic, which the student then copies down and integrates into a term paper, than the Internet really isn’t much better than an online textbook that’s updated more frequently. Teacher Knowledge. Hmm. This is a bigger issue, but I will say quickly that teachers should not be “teaching” not Social Studies. They should be facilitating learning. You point students towards potential answers (or, even better, more questions) to their questions to their own, specific questions. This is a longer discussion.

Let’s get to some alternatives, let’s get to some more open-source tools that educators can use in the classrooms TODAY FOR FREE.

Richard Baraniuk makes an impassioned case for open-source textbooks. Watch his presentation.

Baraniuk also happens to work with Rice University who has started “Connexions”.

Just as a test, I searched in Connexions for US History. Here are the results:

You can see the full results for yourself. They speak for themselves.

Tool #2

Right now, here are some of the more reputable Colleges and Universities offering FREE LECTURES on a variety of subjects via iTunes:
Arizona State • Bowdoin College • DePaul University • Duke • Lehigh University • MIT • New York Law School • Northeastern University • Penn State • Stanford • Texas A&M • Texas Tech • UC Berkeley • U of Arizona • U of Maine • USC • Vanderbilt • Wellesley College • Yale

Some of the courses:
• Green Rush: Eco-Business
• Courting Disaster: The Fight for Oil, Water, and a Healthy Planet
• Defying Genocide in Rwanda
• The Physics of Baseball
• The American West and the Great Depression

Now, these aren’t open-source. They’re very much read-only content (for the difference between read-only and read-write content see my profile of Lawrence Lessig). But this is in its’ infancy.

These are just two tools. If you have others please let me know via comments. More to come…

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