Curriculum as Conversation

Transforming Traditions of Teaching and Learning

By Arthur N. Applebee

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1996 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-02123-2

Contents

Acknowledgments,
ONE. Introduction: The Role of Tradition,
TWO. The Individual and Tradition,
THREE. Deadly Traditions,
FOUR. Curriculum as Conversation,
FIVE. Characteristics of Effective Curricula,
SIX. Structuring Curricular Conversations,
SEVEN. Recent Curriculum Proposals as Domains for Conversation,
EIGHT. Toward a Pedagogy of Knowledge-in-Action,
NINE. Reconciling Conflicting Traditions,
Notes,
References,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Role of Tradition

I begin with tradition: what we mean by it, how it shapes our individual and cultural lives, and, most of all, its relationships to what and how we teach. I will argue that the power of education is intimately bound up in the social and cultural traditions within which education is set. These traditions enable and transform the minds of individuals raised within them, and are in turn themselves transformed by those same individuals. Traditions change as the circumstances that surround them change; in that way they preserve their power to guide the present and the future as well as to reflect the past.

The rhetoric of educational reform, however, has distorted the nature of tradition and its relationship to education. Tradition has been construed as antiprogressive, out of date. It is attacked for preserving the status quo, resisting reform, obstructing social justice. Reinforcing these connotations, conservative educationists have turned to tradition as a source of common values, social stability, and intellectual attainment (see Adler, Van Doren, Bennett, and Bloom). Matthew Arnold's title Culture and Anarchy (1867) starkly encapsulated the choice as he saw it, and his rhetoric continues to echo through our contemporary debates.

But that characterization of education and tradition is simplistic. In particular, in this book I will argue that traditions are the knowledge-in-action out of which we construct our realities as we know and perceive them, and that to honor such traditions we must reconstrue our curriculum to focus on knowledge-in-action rather than knowledge-out-of-context. Traditions in this sense provide culturally constituted tools for understanding and reforming the world, tools of which we, Janus-like, are both heir and progenitor. As we move through life, we learn to draw upon many different traditions that provide alternative, often complementary, ways of knowing and doing—of defining the world and of existing within it.

I write these words sitting at a window at the Villa Serbelloni, in the Lake District of northern Italy, surrounded by traditions. The villa walls are three feet thick, built out of layers of plaster and rubble using techniques that go back thousands of years. My study is in a building that has been a church, a monastery, a private home. It still houses a chapel. Out my window are olive trees and grape arbors, cultivated and harvested using techniques that may be older still. We drink the wine at dinner. I write in English but am surrounded by Italian, two modern languages with prehistoric roots in Indo-European. My writing is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, a modern incarnation of an ancient tradition of philanthropy and patronage. I write on a laptop computer, the latest advance in the equally ancient tradition of scribes and scholars.

The traditions that surround me, then, are both ancient and living. The cultural knowledge that they represent—the tools for making sense of and living in the world—draw from the past but speak to the present and the future: the wine must age; my words will pass from my computer screen to a printed page, and perhaps to a database in an electronic library. So it is with all of the traditions that surround us—those of architecture, agriculture, engineering, the arts, religion, history, science, mathematics, literature. They are traditions of knowledge-in-action, deeply contextualized ways of participating in the world of the present. They live through their use, not through the passing on of knowledge-out-of-context.

Though we sit in the midst of many kinds of traditions, the ones on which I will focus are primarily linguistic. I will be concerned with the traditions of discourse within which we preserve and transform our cultural knowledge, and in particular with how students can better be taught to enter into those traditions through formal schooling.

Discussions of curriculum in American schools and colleges have usually focused on what is most worth knowing: Should we stress the Great Books, the richness of multiculturalism, the basic literacy needed in the worlds of work and leisure? But these arguments have been based on false premises and reflect a fundamental misconception of the nature of knowing. They strip knowledge of the contexts that give it meaning and vitality, and lead to an education that stresses knowledge-out-of-context rather than knowledge-in-action. In such a system, students are taught about the traditions of the past, and not how to enter into and participate in those of the present and future.

In this book, I offer a vision of curriculum that redresses that balance, placing the emphasis on the knowledge-in-action that is at the heart of all living traditions. Such knowledge arises out of participation in ongoing conversations about things that matter, conversations that are themselves embedded within larger traditions of discourse that we have come to value (science, the arts, history, literature, and mathematics, among many others). When we take this metaphor seriously, the development of curriculum becomes the development of culturally significant domains for conversation, and instruction becomes a matter of helping students learn to participate in conversations within those domains.

In elaborating my argument, I explore the ambiguities in my subtitle: Traditions can transform the individual, providing powerful tools for understanding experience; individuals also transform traditions, through the ways in which they make use of and move beyond the tools they inherit; and to ensure that this continues to occur, our traditions of teaching and learning must be transformed so that students learn to enter into the ongoing conversations that incorporate our past and shape our future.

CHAPTER 2

The Individual and Tradition

If, as I will argue, curriculum needs to be rethought in order to foster students' entry into living traditions of knowledge-in-action rather than static traditions of knowledge-out-of-context, what is the nature of such traditions in individual and cultural life? What does it mean to enter into culturally significant traditions of knowing and doing? By examining the relationships between individuals and the traditions of knowing and doing amid which they live, this chapter provides a framework for thinking about what we should expect of our schools and colleges.

The social world of which any individual is a part is richly structured with traditions of knowing and doing that affect all aspects of life. Many of these traditions are encoded in cultural systems of symbolic representation—language, the arts, mathematics, science, religion, history. Each of these is a system of knowledge-in-action, a universe of cultural activity with...