Eric.ed.gov – Professional Development Schools and Developing a Curriculum in the Making with Students

In this article, the author shares his experiences on a journey with 10-12-year-old students from Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood. The quintessential point he wants to make is that curriculum is not all about what state boards of education decide is important for teachers to do with children, or what a teacher decides to construct alone. It also is certainly not fixed or finite. Rather, it is a journey of co-creation and looking to the students for what is worthwhile–what is worth knowing, doing, being, becoming, thinking about, pondering, and wondering. The author became fascinated by the idea of an integrated curriculum–not one that merely connected math and science and threw in a little bit of music, but one that takes into consideration the subjects and ideas that students in which students are most invested. This article shares many of the theoretical tenets he drew on make this work with young people. His hope is that teachers may subsequently connect this work to their efforts within the professional development schools and the school-university partnerships they are cultivating. (Contains 9 notes.)