Educational Psychology Third Edition Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary ...

10. Planning instruction
goals emerge because the children want them. A teacher’s challenge is therefore not planning activities that match
predetermined curriculum goals or objectives, but to respond flexibly and sensitively as students’ interests become
known and explicit. Teachers’ responsiveness is facilitated by two practices that are especially prominent when a
teacher adopts an emergent approach to curriculum. The first is careful, continuous observation of students. The
teacher watches and listens, and may keep informal written records of students’ comments and activities. The
information allows her to respond more effectively to the interests they express, and at the same time it provides a
type of assessment of students’ progress—information about what the students are actually learning.
A second strategy that facilitates teachers’ success is curriculum webbing, a process of brainstorming
connections among initiatives suggested by students and ideas suggested by the teacher. In some cases webs can be
created jointly with students by brainstorming with them about where their current interests may lead. In other
cases they can be created independently by the teacher’s own reflections. In still others, when a classroom has more
than one adult responsible for it, they can be created jointly with fellow teachers or teacher assistants. The latter
approach works especially well in preschool, kindergartens, or special education classrooms, which often have more
than one adult responsible for the class (Vartuli & Rohs, 2006).
To some, emergent curriculum may seem like a formula for curriculum and management disasters. But the
approach has often proved quite successful, particularly in early childhood education and the earliest grade levels of
elementary school (Seitz, 2006; Wurm, 2005). Something akin to emergent curriculum is quite possible, in
principle, even with older students. In Chapter 8, for example, we described a high school program in which
students began with problems and experiences that were personally relevant, and discussed the problems with
classmates to formulate research problems which they then studied more formally and systematically (Hawkins,
2006). In essence this strategy created an emergent curriculum analogous to the ones described above for young
children. What the high school students studied was not predetermined, but emerged from their own expressed
interests.
Multicultural and anti-bias education
A culture is an all-encompassing set of values, beliefs, practices and customs of a group or community—its total
way of life. Cultures may be shared widely, even by much if not all of an entire nation, or they may be shared by
relatively few, such as a small community within a large city. Sometimes the term culture is even applied to the way
of life of an individual family or of a specialized group in society; some might argue, for example, that there is a
culture of schooling shared by teachers, though not necessarily by all students.
Because culture by definition touches on all aspects of living, it is likely to affect students’ perspectives about
school, their ways of learning and their motivations to learn. The differences go beyond obvious differences in
holidays, language, or food preferences. In some cultures, for example, individuals keep good eye contact with
someone to whom they are speaking, and expect the same from others. In other cultures, such behavior is
considered intrusive or overly aggressive, and avoiding eye contact while speaking is considered more respectful. Or
another example: in some cultures it is expected that individuals will be punctual (or on time), whereas in others
punctuality is considered overly compulsive, and a more casual approach to time is the norm. Students regularly
bring differences like these to school, where they combine with expectations from teachers and other school staff,
and contribute indirectly to differences in achievement and satisfaction among students.
218