A Sustainable Curriculum

Introduction

“To move our school structures into more open, fluid, and correspondingly inventive forms, we need new forms, not reform”, says internationally recognized education leader Heidi Hayes Jacobs (2010) in her book Curriculum 21. Curriculum provides guideline for learning and learning is the essence of education. “If there is no learning going on, there is no education going on” said once Sir Ken Robinson (2013, 7:15min), an international advisor on education. Therefore, if one intends to change how schools operate they need to bring new changes to curriculum. In order to create a new form of schools, we need to start by designing a new form of curriculum.

What Values The New Curriculum Should Be Based On

According to Professor Geoff Masters (2020), Chief Executive of the Australian Council for Educational Research, “people aspire to a society that is optimistic, resilient and underpinned by shared moral and ethical values — a society that can bounce back from adversity; that has a strong sense of hope and purpose; and that is prepared to be courageous and provide leadership in addressing challenges, redressing injustices, and alleviating poverty”. In order to become such a strong society we need to raise and educate generations of young learners who are strong morally, mentally and physically. Students need to be brought up in the spirit of setting justice: recognizing injustice and fighting for good of humankind. Masters (2020) adds that “people expect the school curriculum to contribute [to the society] by promoting attributes (character) such as resilience, optimism, a sense of purpose, courage, self-awareness, and moral and ethical responsibility”. If we design the new curriculum based on high moral values that promotes, encourages and builds honorable character, we can achieve sustainable and peaceful life for human race. School should not be simply a place where knowledge is inculcated without further use or simply to get a job. Purpose of life never was and never will be simply to get a job, satisfy personal interests or similar primitive endeavors. I believe life to be something much more than passion, education or anything we could ever comprehend. Our students in class also need to recognize how much life on Earth has to offer and that we need to do preserve it and ensure sustainable development of it. How are we going to teach them these? First of all, we need to guide them to build strong character — how do we achieve this?

Some ideas from Perennialism, to my mind, could be studied to address this question. The purpose of Perennialism is to develop learners intellectually as well as morally. A person needs to think “deeply, analytically, flexibly, and imaginatively”, according to Perennialists. They assert that students shouldn’t learn knowledge that might be outdated or turn out to be inaccurate or wrong (Theodore, n.d.). What I infer from this statement is that we need to aim at creating sustainable curriculum, one which is never outdated but always keeps updating itself based on and reflecting from the ever-changing needs of the individual learner and society. Perennialists believe that by striving towards great ideas and ideals of Great Books learners could build better and stronger character (Ozmon and Johnson, 1967).

What Type Of Curriculum Would Be Most Suitable

Let us first consider our audience and talk about the generation that makes the most of it — Generation Z. They are the children born after 1995 and can be defined as digital natives. According to one study, Gen Z are searchers for truth and 76% of them are religious (Francis and Hoefel, 2018). To prepare Generation Z for jobs that may not even exist yet and “for an uncertain future” (Faust, 2017) we, educators, have to design curriculum that is sustainable — i.e. dynamic, self-updating, responsive, inclusive — individualized and interdisciplinary. I envision the future curriculum as essentially and eventually becoming sustainable. This doesn’t mean that curriculum will only address sustainability issues of the planet, but the curriculum itself needs to be sustainable. I define Sustainable Curriculum as a self-renewable, responsive and inclusive curriculum that is able to identify and effectively satisfy the needs of the learners in a given time and space continuously and autonomously. The new curriculum can be designed as a system of algorithms with inputs and outputs. The inputs would be factors that affect curriculum design and development, namely, student’s academic interests, favorite activities, seating preferences, parents’ involvement, local cultural expectations and so on. The output would be the necessary modification that is made to the previous (or original) curriculum based on the data (the inputs) entered onto the system. Therefore, such curriculum design would offer the most updated and effective curriculum for the learners.

We don’t know what the future holds for us. Look at us today — who would know that we would be sitting at home and teaching online or wearing face masks when we go out to meet friends. Even if some politicians knew this was coming they can’t know the exact outcome of their decisions and how events would end up. So, we need to learn to be adaptable, have strong character, discipline ourselves, be able to connect the dots, draw reasonable conclusions and solve puzzles we have not encountered before. We ought to have solid understanding of relationship between disciplines in order to have the most relevant and effective solutions to current and future challenges as the problems, people and the world are getting more and more diverse.

References:

Faust, D. (2017). This is what Gen Z-designed curriculum looks like for the future. Eschoolnews. https://www.eschoolnews.com/2017/04/17/gen-z-designed-curriculum/

Francis, T. and Hoefel, F. (2018). ‘True Gen’: Generation Z and its implications for companies. Mckinsey. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/true-gen-generation-z-and-its-implications-for-companies#

Jacobs, H. H. (2010). Curriculum 21: Essential Education For A Changing World. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109008/chapters/New-School-Versions@-Reinventing-and-Reuniting-School-Program-Structures.aspx

Masters, G. (2020). The role of the curriculum in creating the future. Teachermagazine. https://www.teachermagazine.com/au_en/articles/the-role-of-the-curriculum-in-creating-the-future

Ozmon, H. A. Jr., Johnson, J. C. (1967). Value Implications In Children’s Reading Material. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED033020.pdf

Robinson, K. (2013). How to escape education’s death valley [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley/transcript?language=en

Theodore, P.A. (n.d.). The Foundations of Education Web: Perennialism. https://www.siue.edu/~ptheodo/foundations/perennialism.html#:~:text=Perennialists%20believe%20that%20the%20focus,history's%20finest%20thinkers%20and%20writers.