Final Version May 5 07

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From the onset though, I was plagued with doubt about my choice. While the
students supported and encouraged an active and reciprocal teaching and learning
environment, I felt it was my duty to inform colleagues of the value of modeling an
emergent curriculum. What I found was a resistance to teaching in an emergent way, as
well as an opposition to teaching constructivism. I was increasingly frustrated with the
instructivist rather than constructivist attitude of some of my colleagues, who insisted on
covering content within a college-prescribed curriculum defined by learning objectives
written in behavioural terms.
While Piaget was still the principal theorist taught, almost 20 years after
graduating from the same program, the word constructivism was rarely heard. Now that I
had found the curriculum approach I had been looking for, which had eluded my practice
with preschoolers, I wanted to model constructivist teaching. In frustration, I gave up the
advocacy role and sought out others with similar ideologies. Rather than seeking
inspiration in covering content, it was my colleagues who spoke of transformative
teaching to whom I turned to for inspiration. When the content becomes the obsession, it
seems to be at the detriment of learning. I wondered whether we were meeting the needs
of the early childhood education student. Jones (1986) explained the dilemma of content
delivery or “covering” the content:
The notion of covering, incidentally, has nothing to do with learning. It
means only that I have salved my conscience by exposing students to all
those important things, through lectures or reading assignments. That is no
guarantee that they have learned them. (p. 17)
McNaughton & Krentz (2000) describe the experience of implementing an early
childhood teacher education program designed to foster critical thinking, challenge
assumptions, and encourage reflection on practice. They suggest that this experience