Abstract
There are various schools of thoughts in curriculum and education practices. This essay evaluates the existentialist curriculum as applied at Blue Valley School District in Kansas. It shows that schools should offer a learning environment that promotes individuality and a sense of freedom in pupils.
Thus, it discourages a rigid curriculum and mass teaching. Teachers remain passive as learners pursue their subjects of interests. A school can adopt other forms of curriculum such as pragmatic to support the available curriculum.
The essay suggests the adoption of a pragmatic curriculum in the schools as a way of renewing the curriculum by focusing on the teacher and the subject matter to drive social aspects of learning and experimentation.
It argues that a renewed approach to the curriculum based on the pragmatic concept should put a greater emphasis on language and literature with regard to social elements of both.
Thus, social elements in studies should not be seen as special but rather as an important part of any curriculum.
It encourages learners to have positive attitudes and experiences as they embrace new ideas and that learning should not occur in succession but rather in a progressive form. Hence, a pragmatic curriculum would improve learning through experiments, social elements and progressive activities.
Application of an Existentialist Curriculum in American Education Practices
An existentialist curriculum emanates from an influential belief in individual free will and the need for people to define and shape their own future.
First, under existentialist curriculum, learners control their own education practices. Instructors encourage learners to understand and value their own uniqueness, assume responsibilities and facilitate self-learning.
In this regard, existentialists propagate “students’ freedom” (Null, 2011, p. 82) while teachers “arrange for students to be part of a community of learners who help each other do their best” (Null, 2011, p. 72). Consequently, they do not support any strict curriculum in education practices and the inclusion of several
subjects alongside specialization at higher levels indicates an approach to education practices based on the existentialist curriculum with flexible schedule.
Second, a curriculum based on existentialism recognizes individual learner unique differences. Consequently, instructors and educators should aim to develop a curriculum that meets needs of such learners.
In this regard, Null notes, “Teachers and curriculum makers, instead of trying to get all students to have the same experience, should embrace the reality of “multiliteracy” (Null, 2011, p. 76).
Such a curriculum should aim to meet the immediate and future needs of students.
For instance, students focus on real-world applications of learned skills, such as writing, reading, science and mathematics in learner-driven classrooms through discussions, debates, and discourses to discover new meanings and answer to questions questions.
Third, the curriculum allows learners to learn about their self. This leads to self-examination and the need for inclusion to accommodate others. At the same time, learners reflect freedom and moral decisions in learning practices.
In this case, Null notes that, “Education ought to help the young learn how to create their own meanings through these forms (of representation)” (Null, 2011, p. 75).
Scientific subjects and mathematics form a part of the existentialist curriculum to allow learners to gain objective skills and critical thinking. However, the curriculum emphasizes the importance of self and self-knowledge (Koirala, 2011, p. 42).
Blue Valley School District in Kansas focuses on an existentialist curriculum. An existentialist curriculum promotes the Socratic Approach to learning. The curriculum is student-centered and learners must strive to generate solutions on their own.
They must collect available evidence and review them to discover new knowledge and identify gaps in the available knowledge.
In some instances, learners must discover new knowledge by conducting research and scrutinizing different studies. In this context, the school promotes the use of an existentialist curriculum for problem solving.
The school encourages individual reading among learners. However, the school also encourages learners to conduct group discussions and express their thoughts.
This approach eliminates the superiority of group outcomes over individual thoughts. Learners may lose free choice and individualism that the philosophy advocates for.
Teachers at Blue Valley School District aim to develop creative capabilities of learners. Consequently, learners engage in practical activities to understand and discover new ideas.
Overall, the existentialist curriculum views students as the main center of focus in education practices and classroom teaching. Instructors seek to accommodate learners’ interests and needs. The role of the instructor is to guide learners. The instructor also facilitates learning to help students to achieve their learning objectives.
The existentialist curriculum focuses on the future needs of learners and prepares them to discover self and be independent. Thus, learners must be creative and develop critical thinking attributes.
An existentialist curriculum strives for absolute freedom and students’ responsibility as they engage in learning. However, they must also account for the needs of society in order to cope well after studies through “the ability to think, speak and deliberate” (Null, 2011, p. 16).
The Pragmatic Curriculum for Improving Learning
Blue Valley School District can enhance the level of education if it implements a pragmatic curriculum to complement its current existentialist model.
The school should encourage educators to join and create a niche for a pragmatic curriculum and develop inquiry approaches. The pragmatic philosophy recognizes the teacher as a guide for students.
He must promote learning in a social environment in order to achieve social efficiency among learners and create a favorable relationship with students. Students at the school can benefit if the teacher adopts a sympathetic strategy to classroom learning. This would promote academic freedom and democratic learning.
The teacher will work with students, suggest problems and engage in “classroom management techniques, research-based procedural skills, and the efficient use of instructional time” (Null, 2011, p. 126). He will give learners opportunities to find solutions as a way of stimulating learning.
The teacher would then challenge learners to go beyond knowledge presented in the textbooks and discover their own. Students will benefit in learning if the teacher adopts experiment or encourages learners to develop specific experiences.
In this context, the teacher encourages learners to learn by doing rather than by knowing. The intention of the teacher is to ensure that learners think and act to develop new ideas rather than repeat ideas from the books.
In Blue Valley School District, teachers can dedicate two weeks to encourage experiments and discovery learning. Null notes that “teachers should take control” (Null, 2011, p. 143) and generate ideas that interest learners and encourage them to solve specific problems.
They must organize and allow learners to demonstrate and facilitate learning among themselves. Therefore, pragmatist ideas will facilitate practical learning that learners require in a modern society.
The focus on the subject matter will also facilitate learning at Blue Valley School District. John Smith notes that “changes are necessary through an innovative curriculum” (Smith, 2008, p. 74), which focuses on the subject matter.
The subject matter of the school curriculum based on a pragmatic approach should promote social life among learners. In this regard, Blue Valley School District should develop a curriculum that goes beyond the current core subjects to include the learner’s own social experiences and activities (Null, 2011, p. 144).
The subject matter should make the learner aware of his or her social heritage and cultural differences. This would enhance appreciation of individual uniqueness among learners.
The subject matter should not consider social activities as special studies. The school should encourage social studies as fundamental forms of the subject matter.
The focus on the subject matter would review how Blue Valley School District presents science studies. The current mode is entirely objective and students regard science as new subject and experience.
The subject matter will introduce science as a part of a knowledge and experience, which learners have already acquired in their previous experiences. Thus, the subject matter of a science should not be new to the student and should support their current knowledge.
A focus on the subject matter would restore the relevance of literature and language studies because the current form has eliminated most of the social aspects of the subject. Language should rise beyond the expression of ideas to include social elements in the content.
The subject matter would allow language to function as a means of communication with social motives rather than as a means of expressing knowledge one has already learned.
Finally, the subject matter would eliminate succession in learning. That is, progress in studying should not be in the succession (Smith, 2008). Instead, it should reflect developments in learners’ attitudes and interests in learning new activities (Smith, 2008).
Thus, the subject matter may eliminate the approach of introducing art, culture, science and others in later grades.
In other words, approaches to curriculum contents should go beyond mere reading and writing in lower grades and “subjects such as manual training, nature study and science should replace reading and writing as the primary focus of the elementary curriculum” (Null, 2011, p. 132).
References
Koirala, M. P. (2011). Existentialism in Education. Academic Voices: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 1(1), 39-44.
Null, W. (2011). Curriculum: from theory to practice. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Smith, J. (2008). Reconciling subjects and contexts: the case for a pragmatic primary curriculum. Educationalfutures, 1(2), 63-74.