“A disconnected curriculum tends to be low in redundancy, the reinforcement of convergent messages that enables us to map our environment and gain confidence in our ability to negotiate it.”  Graff, Gerald.  Clueless in Academe.  London:  Yale University Press, 2003.  p. 70.Though his claim is made in the dense, academic language he criticizes, Graff makes a good point.  I understand him to mean that students need stuff to be repeated, not just in consecutive content courses, but throughout the curriculum as a whole.  And students can apply this repeated stuff more easily to their world if they’re not getting mixed messages the whole time.  Though I wish I had a solution that would allow students to experience this effective redundancy, instead I have a story about more mixed messages.

Two summers ago I spent two weeks working with a  dozen other teachers to revise the K-12 curriculum for teaching research.  Our group discovered and debated several models of research and considered which would be the most effective for teaching our students.  We spent hours dividing up the skill sets between the thirteen grades, each year building upon those mastered in the previous years.  We even made charts and checklists demonstrating for teachers what their students should have learned before coming to their classrooms, and what new skills needed to be introduced in any particular grade level.  We assumed that by repeating the process of introduction, practice, and finally mastery of skills throughout the grades, by the twelfth grade, students would be research experts. 

We were wrong.  We were not necessarily wrong in our thinking, but unfortunately, after all of our hard work that summer, the county decided to discard our plan in favor of. . . no plan at all.  Needless to say, that was a little disheartening.  But what is more disheartening is that many of our students, even at the twelfth grade level, lack basic skills in finding information and applying it to their own lives.  Our plan, though catered specifically to the language arts curriculum,  still would have been a stepping stone toward that “redundancy…of convergent messages” that Graff mentions.  Instead of research building blocks designed reinforce methods of finding and applying knowledge, systematically adding complexity through the grade levels, we now (still) have a hodge-podge of methods that are effective, but also contradictory, in various degrees.  Just as one illustration, some teachers swear by formal notecards as a starting point for serious research, while others (myself included) have never authentically used notecards in their own research processes and can’t justify teaching students a fake methodology.

Despite the curriculum team’s best efforts that summer, our students are still going from class to class, trying to find out what exactly their new teacher wants.  Because our school system was unable (unwilling) to make available a tool for teachers, the students are learning, unlearning, and relearning research methods, depending on who’s receiving their final products.  To their credit though, most students seem impressively able to adapt.