Exploration+1

Assignment: Type ‘curriculum’ into Google. Scan at least ten pages of hits. Where do these pages come from? What do they use the word to refer to? What entities appear most active?
 * Exploration #1**

Result: I explored four pages of links to really get a feel for which entities were most prolific. By the third item in the list Google had started to include "curriculum vitae". These I bypassed. From this cursory exploration it seemed the key players in the search result were the *.edu sites for K-12 schools, universities and state education departments. In lesser numbers were homeschool sites and non-profits such as 4H, online learning, and teacher "help" sites. The next largest contingency seemed to be companies marketing “curriculum” for sale. Few definitions were offered except by Wikipedia and Merriam Webster (the top two hits). Wikipedia seems to be in a struggle to define the word. The "talk page" shows that they are still trying to put some organization on how to present and what to include on the page. They begin with a historical perspective, a good place to start and rely heavily on Bobbit's definition, with a bit of John Dewey thrown in for good measure. They then begin with "formal school" curriculum. Merriam Webster offers two very short definitions of curriculum as **courses** offered by an educational institution or a **set of courses** in a specialization of study. The thesaurus offered me “The word you've entered isn't in the thesaurus". Apparently there are no equivalent terms?! This exploration illustrated for me the heavy focus on the term "curriculum" as being prescriptive. Wikipedia used Bobbitt's definition, which is highly prescriptive. As Ellis points out curriculum can be "misconstrued as 'packages' of skills and content". This is seen in the Google search by all the sites marketing their "prescriptions", and schools outlining their "courses of study". I understand that Google is a way of seeing the use of the term by common society. It reflects a lack of understanding of what curriculum truly can be and the complexity of good curriculum. According to Ellis the term curriculum is a metaphor for a "running course" for runners. Obviously prescriptive and leaving experiential, student-driven, openness out of the picture (you can't have runners running all over the field and have a good outcome ;). Kindergarten is a metaphor for a children's garden. An environment that invites exploration; children pursuing their individual interests and comparing and learning from other children in the garden, perhaps seeking out adults and peers for further explanations and understandings. If the term "curriculum" could be married to the term "kindergarten" this may highlight what is missing in the understanding of "curriculum". The prescriptive, rigid, stable and predictive qualities that curriculum is credited with is only a piece of a more complex system that I find best described by the social science systems theory. The term curriculum is serving as the descriptor for the "anchored base" that social science systems theory describes, where as the term kindergarten could serve as the descriptor for the "open top", where diversity, individualism, creativity, risk-taking, and self-realization occur. Social science theory defines two functions; the narrow function (course of study) and the broad function (school experience). The narrow function or "anchor" defined as "course of study" is exactly the term used by the resulting hits of the Google search for "curriculum". Exactly illustrating what is lost in the term "curriculum". Through post-modern philosophies we have come to understand that there is more than one way of looking at the world. Pre-defined content as a stand-alone can not speak to that. Adult learning theories particularly will support a more pragmatic look at how curriculum serves the adult student. A social constructivist model would be ill-served to be described as "curriculum" if the definition were to be understood as society at large defines it (per Google search results).