Mary Chamberlain, group manager or curriculum teaching and learning with the Ministry of Education.
Cover
Classroom Controversy
by Rebecca Macfie
Continued from page 1...
An important new requirement is that kids must develop attributes known as “key competencies” – how to think (including, somewhat ambitiously, how to “create knowledge”), how to use language, symbols and texts, how to manage themselves (thereby becoming “enterprising, resourceful, reliable and resilient”), how to relate to others, how to participate and contribute.
All this will be underpinned by a smorgasbord of values that schools must impart: excellence, innovation, inquiry, diversity, equity, community, ecological sustainability and integrity. Just how schools are to interpret these values and how anyone will know whether they are being delivered remain to be seen.
Mary Chamberlain, group manager of curriculum teaching and learning with the Ministry of Education, says the new document sets the outcomes that are “too important to be left to chance”: kids must come out as confident, lifelong learners (sound familiar?), they will be literate and numerate and they will have understanding of key content as laid out in the brief subject outlines.
Teachers and principals will interpret these broad requirements via their own “school curriculum”, tailored to the needs of their students.
Nowhere in this document is it stipulated whether, or when, kids will learn, say, the periodic table, or Pythagoras’ theorem, or the difference between a haiku and a sonnet.
Chamberlain suggests it’s implicit in the subject outlines that they will learn such core content, but, more crucially, they’ll understand the relevance of it. “Why is it important [a student] learns the periodic table? What’s he going to do with it, how is he going to connect that? That’s the important thing to know, rather than teaching little bits of things. It’s actually knowing the disciplines of the subject.”
Kevin Donnelly sums all this up in a couple of words: dumbed down.
Donnelly, executive director of Melbourne consultants Education Strategies, was hired by the Education Forum to write a submission on the new curriculum when it was issued in draft in 2006. He’s been arguing for years that New Zealand is following a flawed model by abandoning detailed syllabus documents in favour of a broad, generic curriculum that denies teachers a clear “road map” of content.
Outcomes-based education, which gives precedence to “generic skills and competencies, like thinking, working in teams, being future-oriented, instead of teaching the type of essential knowledge and understanding associated with traditional subjects like history, geography, mathematics and literature”, has been adopted by only a handful of countries and there’s little evidence as to its effectiveness, he says.
“The more successful countries have a clear expectation that certain things will be taught at a certain year level, and they generally have a strong testing and assessment regime where there are consequences for not learning it. For instance, in Singapore, kids are streamed … and kids are failed – four out of 10 is a failure.
“The New Zealand [approach] is based on the assumption that the student is the centre of the curriculum. In Australia, we are moving away from that and saying, ‘Hold on, we need to teach them something.’”
For all the verbiage about the pace of technological change and the explosion in new knowledge, Donnelly and Moses argue that much of the important stuff remains the same. “No matter how many years have passed since Pythagoras’ Theorem or the theorems related to Euclidean geometry were first set down, they are still as relevant now as when first discovered,” wrote Donnelly in his submission.
Moses: “We need to stand back and say, ‘What are the things that have actually stood the test of time? Why is Shakespeare still important? What does Othello say to us about the human condition and the nature of jealousy? What does Macbeth say about the nature of power? Why do these things still speak to me today?’
“What we are seeing in this new curriculum is simply a continuation of the previous curriculum, and if you stand right back and ask, ‘What is it about the drift of curriculum development over the last 20 years?’, then my concerns are that the importance of knowledge per se is not given the same emphasis that it used to have. There is still a body of knowledge that an educated youngster should have … We can become so focused on teaching computer skills and all the rest of it that we can end up producing kids who know a great deal about the immediate but not too much about the past.”
Moses says Chamberlain “let the cat out of the bag” in a newspaper story last year in which she was quoted saying, “There’s no use [students] being little knowledge banks walking around on legs. We’ve got computers, we don’t need people walking around with them in their heads.”
That quote has been widely used by critics of the new curriculum to lampoon Chamberlain and deride the document.
But Chamberlain she says she was misrepresented in the newspaper story, and the implication that the new curriculum diminishes the importance of core subject content because kids can simply Google the facts they need is wrong.
