Book review: Applebee's Curriculum as Conversation
smagor who-is-at aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu
Wed, 24 Apr 96 09:17:53 -0500
>
>I have recently reviewed Arthur Applebee's new book *Curriculum as
>Conversation: Transforming Traditions of Teaching and Learning*
>(1996, U. of Chicago Press) for the American Journal of Education,
>to be published some time later this year. I thought network
>subscribers might find the review of some interest.
>
>
> Exploring the themes of tradition and reform has driven Arthur
>Applebee's work since the publication of his first book in 1974.
>In Curriculum as Conversation he continues to examine these themes
>with a focus on changing the way educators think about curriculum.
>Applebee argues curriculum, rather than stressing knowledge as a
>body of information to be mastered, should conceive of knowledge as
>action, of activity in cultural practices.
> Education, according to Applebee, is tied to the social and
>cultural traditions within which it is set. By traditions Applebee
>means "the knowledge-in-action out of which we construct our
>realities as we know and perceive them" (pp.1-2). In defining
>tradition in this way Applebee distances himself from the
>pejorative sense that tradition often is granted in educational
>discourse, such as accounts of classrooms in which "traditional
>teaching" is regarded as anachronistic and ineffective. Traditions
>to Applebee "provide culturally constituted tools for understanding
>and reforming the world, tools of which we, Janus-like, are both
>heir and progenitor" (p. 2, italics in original). Of particular
>concern to Applebee are the traditions of discourse through which
>students are enculturated to the values of academic disciplines.
>In order for curricula to enable students to make transformations
>through school work, students need to enter and take part in
>disciplinary practices through appropriate activity, particularly
>the conversation through which disciplinary practices are
>developed.
> Applebee thus sees schooling as a process that should take
>place through participation in genres of activity. Yet most
>schools conceive curriculum as the identification of what those in
>authority consider to be most worth knowing, an emphasis that
>Applebee argues results in the reduction of potentially vital and
>meaningful knowledge to "knowledge-out-of-context": "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" (p. 3). Applebee's curriculum would displace content-
>driven schooling with schooling that involves students in the
>"socially constituted traditions of meaning-making that are valued
>in the cultures of which they are a part" (p. 9). That is, they
>will learn content by making it a central topic of their
>conversations, and participate in those conversations through their
>appropriation of the conventions that have traditionally structured
>speech in particular disciplines. These conventions are not
>imparted to students explicitly but become part of the tacit
>knowledge that students develop of the social rules that structure
>communication in academic disciplines. Students thus experience
>schooling as "a process of mastering new traditions of discourse"
>(p. 9). By learning to participate in these traditional
>disciplinary ways of talking, students acquire a dynamic set of
>tools for participating in and making sense of the world.
> Applebee argues that a curriculum based on a decontextualized
>set of facts stifles the sort of conversation that he feels is
>necessary for students to grow. Teachers end up setting all goals
>and dominating the floor. Rote memorization replaces synthesis in
>students' manipulation of material. Discourse traditions that
>treat knowledge as the subject of lectures are, to Applebee,
>"deadly" to students' efforts to experience transformations through
>schooling.
> Conversation, on the other hand, mediates between the broader
>traditions that students learn outside school and the discourse
>traditions that they must learn to succeed within it. Learning to
>"do school" is critical to students' academic success. Applebe
>says that
> The problem for curriculum and instruction is to
> ensure that [school] traditions are constituted as
> systems of knowledge-in-action, available as tools to
> guide present and future behavior, rather than systems of
> knowledge-out-of-context, stripped of their constructive
> and constitutive potential. That means, in turn, that
> the process of schooling must be a process of actually
> entering into particular traditions of knowing and doing.
> Students must discuss literature they have read, not
> simply be taught about its characteristics; they must do
> science, not simply be told its results; and they must
> engage in mathematically based problem solving, not
> simply memorize formulas. (p. 36)
>A curriculum ought to provide domains for conversation, which in
>turn become the primary means of teaching and learning. Through
>these conversations, students can enter into culturally significant
>traditions of knowledge-in-action. Applebee stresses that when
>situated in discipline-based conversations, the content knowledge
>that makes up the bulk of most curricula becomes more vital and
>useful to students, and therefore more likely to become a part of
>their cultural tool kit.
> In his move away from content as the driving force in
>curriculum, Applebee says that "The problem of curriculum planning,
>then, is the problem of establishing a conversational domain and
>fostering relevant conversations within it" (p. 44). This
>conversational domain should be culturally significant so that the
>curriculum is organized around living traditions, those that not
>only emerge from the past but can serve as tools for understanding
>the present and anticipating the future. Furthermore, the
>conversation envisioned by Applebee is not one that is confined to
>individual classes but one that extends through a student's
>involvement in a discipline so that it encompasses and interrelates
>knowledge throughout the domain. The conversation, he says, should
>be both disciplinary so that students understand the unique vision
>available through a field of study, and interdisciplinary so that
>students can learn to think across domains.
> To Applebee a curriculum should be initiated by "a
>consideration of the conversations that matter--with traditions and
>the debates within them that enliven contemporary civilization" (p.
>52). Applebee stresses that there needs to be a spirit of
>cooperation among students and teachers in order for these
>conversations to serve as the mediational tools he envisions. Such
>conversations have four key characteristics: they are built around
>language episodes of high quality, they have an appropriate breadth
>of materials to sustain conversation, they include a variety of
>parts that are interrelated, and they include instruction that is
>geared to promote students' entry into the curricular conversation
>through such processes as instructional scaffolding.
> The curriculum, says Applebee, is the vehicle that shapes the
>kinds of knowledge-in-action that students develop. A curriculum
>should attend to the kinds of experiences students have and the
>relationships that can be established among those experiences.
>Students' entry into and increasing fluency with disciplinary
>conversations constitutes the primary experience afforded by a
>curriculum. In shifting the curricular focus from bodies of
>knowledge to be mastered to questions and themes that form the
>basis for conversation, Applebee establishes a new direction for
>curriculum planning. Typical curricula, he says, consist of
>catalogs of items, collections of information, sequences of events,
>and episodes of occurrences. Applebee argues that the wisest way
>to organize a curriculum is so that students are able to integrate
>knowledge through participation in an extended conversation:
> The most comprehensive curricular conversations occur
> when students discover interrelationships across all of
> the elements in the curriculum, so that the parallel but
> independent discussions of an episodic curriculum begin
> to echo back on one another. As new elements enter into
> the conversation, they provide not only new contexts for
> exploring or redefining the established topic, but new
> perspectives on other elements in the conversation, and
> on the topic itself. Here, the conversation involves a
> process of continuing reconstrual not only of what has
> just been introduced, but, in light of new ideas,
> everything that has come before. (p. 77)
>An integrated approach provides students and teachers an
>opportunity to shape the course of the conversation, allowing
>students to make it their own. With their subject an ongoing
>discourse, the knowledge students gain is dynamic and thus the
>knowledge-in-action that Applebee believes is necessary for a
>curriculum to work.
> Applebee argues that in order for teachers to engender and
>sustain the disciplinary conversations that are essential to
>student development, they must be active participants in the
>disciplines they teach. He thus argues that secondary school
>teachers should complete a full-scale majors in the subjects they
>will teach, an argument that assumes that disciplinary
>conversations are actually taking place in college classrooms--
>interestingly enough, a point that Applebee himself questions
>elsewhere in this book. Additionally, they should have pedagogical
>content knowledge, including an understanding of what students
>learn as they learn a new discipline, of how activities can be
>structured to support such learning, and of how curricular
>conversations can be initiated and sustained in classrooms.
> Above all, the conversation that makes the curriculum should
>be genuine, dynamic, dialogic, cooperative, and extended. Teachers
>are the key mediators of this conversation, helping students move
>from traditions they bring to the classroom to those they must
>learn within the classroom. The teacher's role thus shifts from
>judging students' performances to helping students perform better.
>Assessment will then shift from knowledge of a subject to
>knowledge-in-action, focusing on students' ability to define
>interesting questions, express a clear point of view, gather
>evidence, and structure arguments according to disciplinary
>conventions. Assessment thus emphasizes students' developing
>abilities to enter disciplinary conversations.
> In Curriculum as Conversation Applebee offers a view of
>curriculum and schooling predicated on the importance of students'
>participation in meaningful disciplinary activity. Curriculum
>planning, instead of consisting of an identification of the content
>students should be exposed to, becomes a process of identifying the
>themes students might fruitfully talk about and the activities they
>might engage in so that they may become active, informed members of
>communities of practice. Applebee provides some examples of what
>such a curriculum should look like through excerpts from his own
>research and that of others, thus illustrating his principles with
>vignettes from actual schooling. For those who are frustrated by
>the limited vision of typical curricula, who seek a way to organize
>schooling according to socially-based principles, and who believe
>in the active role of students in developing the substance of their
>education, Curriculum as Conversation will make for wise and
>inspiring reading.
>
Peter Smagorinsky
University of Oklahoma
College of Education
Department of Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum
820 Van Vleet Oval
Norman, OK 73019-0260
(405)325-3533
fax: (405)325-4061
smagor who-is-at aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu
psmagorinsky who-is-at uoknor.edu