Journal #7

Journal #7

Okay, I am going to approach Pirie’s Chapter 8 from a little different angle. The quote at the beginning of the chapter from Macdonald Daly stresses the need for an integrated curriculum to explore and analyze cultural activities. Well, duh. This is not a new thought, and quite a few schools are already doing it.

Lots of schools, including Park Center, give students a choice to take an integrated class that combines social studies and English. While this isn’t exactly what Pirie was getting at, it could (and should) be. Pirie chastises us for being part of a discipline that “grandly claims to be about how humans use language to make sense of their world,” but settles for so much less. He says it too often ends up being about individual readers responding to individual texts, and I know that is true in a lot of classrooms.

As we’ve seen in many of our readings, and even demonstrated ourselves throughout the last two weeks, it just doesn’t have to be that way. There are myriad ways to get out of the individual reader response trap, as well as pulling in other texts and entire areas of study to enhance English curriculum without the re-branding of it as Cultural Studies.

One time-tested way is what a couple of my kids have experienced, and that is a Humanities class. In two different schools they had this opportunity that goes beyond Park Center’s integrated English and Social Studies class. At PC that works well, but really it is just a coordination of the eras and events taught in Social Studies and English texts from or about that period.

At my kids’ schools, their Humanities courses did that, but so much more. They combined history, sociology, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and English literature, and met for two hours a day. The best part was that the kids themselves contributed greatly to the learning by being prepared through reading and journal writing, but then participating in dynamic exchanges in the classroom. Sometimes there were classic Socratic methods used, but most often it was small and large group exchanges without teacher interference.

I would be interested in being in a classroom like that. Pirie wrote about language being a currency with value only when it is exchanged, and in a way, that is what was at the heart of Amanti’s article, too. In that case, the author was championing the value of what Pirie called “interactions,” and how they’re enhanced by having a greater understanding of the students by observing their home life. By doing that the teacher identified a unifying topic (horses) and was able to develop a unit that crossed curriculums so that English, Science, and other subjects could all be addressed in this module.

On thing I think I can use from this is the idea of selecting a topic that is part of their shared culture, but is not necessarily regarded as being emblematic of their ethnic culture. Horses are part of the culture of hundreds of countries on six continents, so it doesn’t reduce the Mexican culture to some of the stereotypic artifacts we discussed in class.

When one starts to think of what that could be, it may get discouraging. Even though Pirie dismissed the idea of substituting Batman for Macbeth, the fact remains that we can easily go down that road when we examine what passes for shared experiences among our students. Unfortunately, mass media has become the shared experience for most urban and suburban kids, along with video games and online life. While I guess I could put together a unit on You Tube, FaceBook, and Grand Theft Auto, I am not confident it would bring the kids to a place of exploration, rather than just regurgitation.