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Curriculum Making,
Reciprocal Learning,
and the
Best-Loved Self
Cheryl J. Craig
Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese
and Western Education
Series Editors
Michael Connelly
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, Canada
Shijing Xu
Faculty of Education
University of Windsor
Windsor, ON, Canada
This book series grows out of the current global interest and turmoil
over comparative education and its role in international competi-
tion. The specific series grows out of two ongoing educational
programs which are integrated in the partnership, the University of
Windsor-Southwest University Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning
Program and the Shanghai-Toronto-Beijing Sister School Network. These
programs provide a comprehensive educational approach ranging from
preschool to teacher education programs. This framework provides a
structure for a set of ongoing Canada-China research teams in school
curriculum and teacher education areas. The overall aim of the Partner-
ship program, and therefore of the proposed book series, is to draw on
school and university educational programs to create a comprehensive
cross-cultural knowledge base and understanding of school education,
teacher education and the cultural contexts for education in China and
the West.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15114
Cheryl J. Craig
Curriculum Making,
Reciprocal Learning,
and the Best-Loved
Self
Cheryl J. Craig
Department of Teaching, Learning & Culture
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX, USA
Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education

ISBN 978-3-030-60100-3 ISBN 978-3-030-60101-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60101-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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For Imogen
Foreword
Curriculum making, reciprocal learning and the best-loved self invites us

to enter into a personal journey, walking along with Cheryl Craig as she
reflects on her three lines of inquiry. This book is at the same time an
individual’s story—the author’s experiences as a scholar of teaching and
as a scholarly teacher—and a call for rethinking teaching and the study
of it. Craig begins her book reflecting on personal challenges that affect
her deeply as she begins writing. She is also publishing this volume at
a timely moment, one that speaks to the heightened need to understand
teaching and to benefit from the fresh insights offered by “looking across”
(Clandinin, 2013, p. 13) not only research studies but cultural contexts.
This book is powerfully a story of stories. Readers are invited to hear
and see Cheryl think out loud as she revisits stories from a range of
teachers—from different school and national contexts and at different
stages of their teaching careers. Using what Schwab (1983) called “serial
interpretation,” Cheryl Craig thinks across these individual stories, as
well as visits the stories of individual teachers over time, to develop new
understandings of curriculum and the powerful, albeit vulnerable, work
of teachers. Along the way, Cheryl chooses Schwab, Dewey, and Confu-
cius, among others, as thinking companions who spark her inquiry as she
tells her own story, naming some of what she discovers about teaching,
learning, and her commitments and insights as a scholar. This book
persuasively helps us see how stories matter.
vii
viii FOREWORD
Metaphors matter too. Here, metaphors offer sparkling windows onto

the intricate lives of teacher and their practices. In the multilayered
approach Cheryl creates, we see the ways she weaves metaphors together,
allowing us to see patterns while never forcing one story to be subsumed
by some larger frame. The result is a chance for readers to recognize the
significance of different images of teachers—for example, as curriculum
maker or curriculum implementer. Through the forceful reminder of
the need for balance between images, the book emphasizes the human
dimension of teaching and its contextual nature.
Metaphors are powerful ways of shaping what we see: they allow us
a vivid and concrete window into complex phenomena. For those of us
who appreciate the power of words, stories and images, watching Cheryl
explore what lies beneath a metaphor, or how she comes to name an
ineffable but compelling experience, this book’s richness will be a great
delight.
The richness of the rethinking about teaching is deepened by Craig’s
openness to her own learning as a scholar. As she examines curriculum,
teaching and teachers, she explores these questions by making full use,
and even seeking out, what she sees as reciprocal learning opportunities.
Readers catch glimpses of classrooms, conference venues, and even restau-
rant tables filled with food and conversation not just in the US, but in
such seemingly “different” contexts such as China, Korea, or Russia. I
am impressed by the humility Cheryl brings to her opportunities to learn
from and with her colleagues—teachers, her own students, her research
peers—in new settings. She does not pretend to be an “expert” but
instead seeks to explore the cultural, social, and historical background to
make sense of any one event; at the same time, through her learning with
these colleagues, she gains understandings she, and we, might not have
reached.
As I write this preface, and the global pandemic rages in the US, I
am acutely aware that so much of our lives is bound up in the well-
being, insights, and experiences of those outside our borders. While it
may not have been the originating impulse for this book, the reflections
woven throughout the pages of this volume provide a compelling argu-
ment for the value of reciprocal learning. Craig’s ability to see the many
braids that make up the tapestry that is teaching is enriched by the puzzles
and surprises as well as recognition (of familiarity) offered by her time in
classrooms outside her native and adopted homes of Canada and the US.
FOREWORD ix
While narrating stories of great variety, Craig also paints a picture that
is clear: teachers matter. Indeed, for some time, there has been heightened
recognition that teachers are key to education and to students’ learning
(Paine, Blömeke, and Aydarova, O., 2016). While international studies
and reports now routinely trumpet this fact, this book gives us a gener-
ously personal account that will be for many far more persuasive. In recog-
nizing the importance of how teachers, and researchers of teaching, seek
to be their “best loved selves,” this book argues for the need to listen
empathetically and reflexively to what, how, and why teachers know and
do, as well as how (and why) we know what we know about teaching.
Cheryl finds resonance in many Confucian aphorisms. As I read, I kept
thinking of one of the most famous ones: “…in a party of three people,
there must be one from whom I can learn.” This book reflects Cheryl’s
journey as she has shared stories with many in many places. Along the
way, she is open to learning, and relearning. As we walk alongside her, we
in turn benefit as learners.
Lynn Paine, Ph.D.

Professor, Teacher Education
Associate Dean, International Studies
College of Education
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, USA
References
Clandinin, D. J. (2013). Developing qualitative inquiry. Engaging in narrative
inquiry. Left Coast Press.
Paine, L., Blömeke, S., and Aydarova, O. (2016). Teachers and teaching in
the context of globalization. In D. Gitomer, & C. Bell (Eds.), Handbook of
Research on Teaching (5th edition) (pp. 717–786). Washington, DC: AERA.
Schwab, J. (1983). The practical 4: Something for curriculum professors to do.
Curriculum Inquiry, 13(3), 239–265.
Contents
1 Curriculum Making 1 1
2 Curriculum Making 2 57
3 Reciprocal Learning 83
4 The Best-Loved Self 117
Afterword 157
Index 163
xi
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Commonplaces of curriculum 7

Fig. 1.2 The Shadow of New York mural (Courtesy of Bernadette
Lohle) 29
Fig. 1.3 The map of activities on the sports field 37
Fig. 2.1 Tribute to John Dewey on a school wall in Beijing, China 60
Fig. 2.2 John Dewey’s Chinese students (From top left to top
right: Hu Shih, Chiang Monlin, Tao, Xingzhi, Zhang
Zuoping; From bottom left to bottom right: Shi Liangcai,
Alice Dewey, John Dewey) 61
Fig. 2.3 The concept of cooperative and symbiotic teaching
research (Bu & Han, 2019) 64
Fig. 2.4 Teacher construction and development model in Chinese
schools (Bu et al., unpublished paper) 65
Fig. 3.1 Comparative models: Comparison and interpretation
(Connelly & Xu, 2019) 107
Fig. 3.2 Knowing and doing (Connelly & Xu, 2019) 107
Fig. 3.3 Visual representation of process of reciprocal learning
over time (Zhu, 2018) 109
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Curriculum Making 1
Abstract Three narrative threads—curriculum making, reciprocal

learning, and the best-loved self—seam this book into a cohesive whole.
This first chapter—Curriculum Making 1—sets the stage for Curriculum
Making 2 and other chapters that follow. I begin by underscoring the
importance of teachers as communicated by well-known international
researchers and supranational organizations. I then define Schwab’s
curriculum commonplaces and introduce two dominant images of
teaching: teacher-as-curriculum-implementer and teacher-as-curriculum-
maker. Next, I spotlight the curriculum making of four teachers who
I studied longitudinally in the US. I end with an overview of what I
learned about curriculum making from my close work with these teachers
and the contexts of their teaching. This prepares me for Curriculum
Making 2 where I shine the spotlight exclusively on Chinese teachers-as-
curriculum-makers and end with a synopsis of curriculum making that
commingles what has been learned in both countries.
Keywords Curriculum making · Teacher-as-curriculum-maker ·

Teacher-as-curriculum-implementer · Teacher growth · Contexts of
teaching · Commonplaces of curriculum
© The Author(s) 2020 1

C. J. Craig, Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning,
and the Best-Loved Self, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning
in Chinese and Western Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60101-0_1
2 C. J. CRAIG
Curriculum Making
When I was asked to write this Palgrave Pivot book in the Intercul-
tural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education Series, I was
delighted and honored by the invitation. Curriculum making, reciprocal
learning, and the best-loved self is a topic dear to my heart. The Palgrave
Pivot invitation and my research niche complemented one another; they
fit together like hand-in-glove. The opportunity was one I would not
want to miss. However, despite my high interest, best intentions, and past
publishing record, this volume has not been easy to get off the ground.
My mother died shortly after I signed the contract to publish this book.
While I was able to resume the majority of my myriad of activities after
her funeral, I could not bring myself to this writing task. It presented a
formidable challenge. Rather than remaining stuck in a “hardened story”
(Conle, 1996) that determined what I could and could not do, I decided
to plunge the depths and write toward the pain as others have suggested
(i.e., Waldman, 2016; Ward, 2016). I will not burden readers with the
breadth and depth of what I personally uncovered in my reflective anal-
ysis. However, I do want to underscore three critically important points
as to why my mother’s passing and the authoring of this book became
inexorably linked.
The first is this. My mother had two children—my deceased brother,
who was her hometown success—and me. I was a daughter born over a
decade after her son. Massive changes had happened in the interim. My
mother needed a different plotline for me. Her father, a British immi-
grant to Canada, had fought in World War I and two of her brothers,
one who went on to be a leader in the Canadian Armed Forces, served
in World War II. All of this preceded me becoming my mother’s child
for the world. Consequently, I attended university, something my imme-
diate family members had not done. I furthermore left the “breadbasket
of the world” (a prairie province) and lived my adult life near the Rocky
Mountains in Canada and in the Gulf Coast region of the US. I also
have traveled extensively and delivered plenary addresses on all but one
of the world’s continents. Not once did my mother ever suggest that I
preempt an international engagement to spend more time with her. In
short, I was doing—am doing—what she had in mind for me. Engaging
in deep reflection, I discovered a synergy between the international back-
drop of the reciprocal learning book series and the parental story my
mother bestowed on me at birth. A correspondence as “invisible as air”
1 CURRICULUM MAKING 1 3
and as “weightless as dreams” (Stone, 1988, p. 244) became perceptible

after her death.
The second commonplace of experience (Lane, 1988) connecting this
book project to my mother is the fact that she was a proud Canadian.
Among the possessions she left me were a Canadian flag and her treasured
maple leaf pin. Clearly, she did not want me to forget the Canadian part of
my dual citizenship (Canadian + American). Thinking backward into my
life, I recall her asking more questions about the Canada-China Recip-
rocal Learning Project than she did about my other US-based research
initiatives. I always attributed her special interest in the reciprocal learning
project to her being a staunch Canadian. However, my look back revealed
something I probably intuitively knew but had not said out-loud. When
I attended the Canadian conferences biennially, I always went to see
my mother before or after the meetings. This meant that every second
year she was assured of an extra visit from me. Hence, I have a special
connection to the Canada-China project because of my mother’s ongoing
reminders that I am Canadian and because of my own bred-in-the-bone
allegiance to my family, my home country, and my birth identity. I also
visit China twice annually because of a long-term collaboration there,
along with a bevy of former doctoral students and former visiting scholars
who I visit regularly. For these multiple interconnected reasons, I would
not want this endeavor to receive anything less than my fullest attention
in the aftermath of my mother’s death.
The third major point my soul-searching brought to light has to do
with heart. My mother was the lifeblood of my family just as curriculum
is the lifeblood of schools. Without her, neither my brother nor I would
have had breath or life. Without curriculum, teachers, students, and
schools are rudderless and lacking in purpose. For a time following my
mother’s death, I, too, drifted aimlessly. My beacon of support was gone.
No longer did I have her anchoring me. Also, as long as she lived, I
would not be the sole surviving member of my nuclear family. However,
my father died in 2000 and my brother passed away the year before my
mother. Their individual and collective deaths irrevocably changed my
life. A piece of me departed with them. Unavoidably, my identity shifted.
My attempt to un-know what I already knew (Vinz, 1997) about being
the lone family survivor likewise drove a wedge between the writing of
this book and me.
4 C. J. CRAIG
The Curriculum-Teaching Puzzle

When I acknowledged these painful connections, I dislodged my stuck
story. I stripped it of its ruling power. I was free to focus full atten-
tion on Curriculum making, reciprocal learning, and the best-loved self . I
begin now with curriculum making, the first of two curriculum chapters
contributing to my tripartite agenda. Because curriculum making cannot
happen without teachers, let me begin by asserting teachers’ primacy in
the educational enterprise, which is much like my mother’s primacy in my
family and in my life…
The Primacy of Teachers

“Teachers matter….” That is what OECD, the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, concluded more than a
decade and a half ago based on a 25-country study reported in the
official policy statement, Teachers Matters: Attracting, developing and
retaining effective teachers (OECD, 2005). “Teachers matter…” OECD
reconfirmed in 2018 in Valuing our teachers and raising their status
(Schleicher, 2018). “Teachers matter…” the Varkey Foundation (2016),
sponsor of the Global Teacher Prize, proclaimed. “Teachers matter”
was a recent feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Jenkins,
2016). “Teacher education matters…” asserted leading US researcher,
Linda Darling Hammond (2000), in her article, “How teacher educa-
tion matters.” “Teacher education matters…” stated William Schmidt
and his colleagues (2011) in Teacher education matters: A study of
middle school mathematics teacher preparation in six countries. “Teacher
education matters…,” wrote Frances Rust (2017, p. 383) in a recent
Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice editorial. “Preparing teachers
to teach matters,” stressed Suzanne Wilson (2014, p. 190). “Making
teacher education matter” headlined Jean Clandinin and Jukka Husu
in the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (Husu & Clan-
dinin, 2017, p. 1169) “Teacher quality matters,” added Christopher
Day (2017) in Teachers’ worlds and work. “Teacher quality matters,”
noted Gregory Ramsey in the Australia Department of Education
document, Quality matters, Revitalising teaching: Critical times, Crit-
ical choices (Ramsey, 2000, p. 1). “Teaching quality matters most,”
declared Dan Goldhaber (2016) in his half-century celebration of
the Coleman Report, the most influential American policy document
following the Brown vs. Board of Education court ruling. The quality
of a nation’s education cannot supersede “the quality of its teachers,”
wrote Barber and Mourshed (2007, p. 13) in the McKinsey Report. Even
actor, Matt Damon, whose mother is a teacher, has widely claimed that
he and presumably others would not be where they are today without
creative teachers. Educational researchers, supranational organizations,
and popular opinion affirm the age-old maxim that “the influence of a
good teacher can never be erased.”
However, despite widespread agreement about the importance of
teachers, research largely focuses on stakeholders, and what they think
preservice and practicing teachers should know and do. What preser-
vice and practicing teachers need to flourish in their teaching careers
has received comparatively little attention. Also, most of what has been
written has been of an abstract bent. A scarcity of research addresses what
is fundamentally important to growing, nurturing, and sustaining quality
teachers in their own terms. If I distilled my 25 years of researching
teaching and teacher education into a handful of topics, one recurrent
theme would certainly be teachers’ desires to be curriculum makers. A
topic not far behind would be teachers’ riling against others casting them
as implementers. This raises the question of how I connect teaching and
curriculum making and how the image of a teacher-as-a-curriculum-maker
compares and contrasts with the image of teacher-as-implementer, among
others. Let me begin by discussing curriculum making generally and then
I will unpack the root images of teaching as I have come to know them.
Curriculum
I start interculturally with the Mandarin word for curriculum, kèchéng (
课程). As my Chinese students, visiting Asian scholars, collaborators, and
the literature (i.e., Zhang & Gao, 2014) have informed me, kèchéng
means people discussing the teaching and learning journey. I imagine
these talks would take place at a table. From a Confucian perspective,
the unfolding conversations would be filled with possibilities. The overall
purpose would be to unite heaven and humanity so that they, along with
earth, can interact harmoniously (Li, 2008). To my way of thinking, the
curriculum making table at which these dialogues would take place would
be similar to the table Native American poet, Byrd Baylor (1994), had in
mind. It would be one “where [experientially] rich people sit.” For me,
as a Western scholar, the Eastern origin of the word, curriculum, not
as a stale, flaccid, archaic document, but as something dynamic, inter-
actional, aspirational, and breathing, organically connects with Schwab’s
6 C. J. CRAIG
curriculum commonplaces and the notion of curriculum as a lived experi-

ence. These near-universal considerations (Goodson, 2007) are the ones
that I picture all international educators would deliberate in their own
contextualized ways. After all, “[curriculum-making rests] not on ideal
or abstract representation, but on the real thing, on the concrete case,
in all its completeness and with all its differences from other concrete
cases…” (Schwab, 1969, p. 11). The real thing—the concrete case—
is what Ted Aoki1 (1989/1990) termed the “full-life of curriculum”
(which stands in stark contrast to the “half-life”) and what Jean Clan-
dinin2 and Michael Connelly3 called the lived curriculum. It would
embed “a story of action within a theory of context” in real-time ways
(Stenhouse, 1976, p. 7). Through this process, “teachers and students
live out a curriculum… An account of teachers’ and students’ lives over
time is the curriculum, although intentionality, objectives [abstractions],
and curriculum materials do play a part…” (Clandinin & Connelly,
1992, p. 365). From this perspective, boundaries separating teaching,
learning, and curriculum would fade as Schwab’s “practical, a language
for curriculum” (Schwab, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1983) would take hold and
“more satisfying lives” (Schwab, 1975), education’s ultimate aim, would
be instantiated. Curriculum known “by the people it produces, as well as
by other signs and standards” would be realized (Schwab, 1983, p. 247).
Curriculum Commonplaces
Schwab (1973) believed that all curriculum making discussions involve
four desiderata or commonplaces, terms Schwab used interchange-
ably (see Fig. 1.1). Where these curriculum making considerations are
concerned, there would never be a “perennially right ordering of the
desiderata or a perennially right curriculum” because the common-
places—the building blocks—are always in flux (Schwab, 1974, p. 315).
1 I had the good fortune of personally knowing Ted Aoki who is now deceased. I
helped facilitate his work with teachers and attended his local conference presentations
when I lived in Alberta, Canada.
2 D. Jean Clandinin was my doctoral supervisor and my post-doctoral co-supervisor. I
am grateful for her rich contributions to my education and life.
3 F. Michael Connelly was my post-doctoral co-supervisor who also greatly influenced
me. He is the Co-Principal Investigator of the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Project,
along with Shi Jing Xu, who is the Principal Investigator. They are co-editors of this
Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education book series.
Teacher
Curriculum
Milieu Learner
Making
Subject
Matter
Fig. 1.1 Commonplaces of curriculum
At the same time, equal contributions from the teacher commonplace, the
learner commonplace, the subject matter commonplace, and the milieu
commonplace would be needed for balanced (harmonious) classroom
curriculum making.
This is because students as learners are “one skin-full” with
subject matter being another consideration—another “fragment of the
whole” (Schwab, 1953, p. 210). However, when all four common-
places are combined, they...bound ...“statements identified as...curricular”
(Connelly & Clandinin, 1988, p. 84).
Also, if we enter into curriculum deliberations through one curriculum
commonplace, we produce different synergies with the three other
curriculum considerations and arrive at different understandings. The
fact that I typically conduct research from the teacher perspective
means that my curriculum making entry point is through the teacher
commonplace. This makes sense, given that my research program—
whether about school reform (Craig, 2001, 2004), the contexts of
8 C. J. CRAIG
teaching (Ciuffetelli Parker & Craig, 2017; Craig, 2007; Craig &
Huber, 2007), subject matter (Oh, You, Kim, & Craig, 2013; Olson
& Craig, 2009a), teachers (Craig, 2012a; Olson & Craig, 2001), or
students (Craig, 1998; Craig, Li, Rios, Lee, & Verma, under review)—is
approached from a teacher point of view, that is, through the teacher
lens (Craig, 2012b). Hence, my scholarship unfolds at the intersec-
tion where the teaching and curriculum fields meet (Craig & Ross,
2008). At this point of convergence, I typically focus on a teacher or
a group of teachers and specifically refer to students and subject matter.
My scholarship also pays significant attention to milieu. This is because
my ongoing research puzzles have to do with how teaching contexts
influence what it is that preservice and practicing teachers know and
do in addition to who they are and how they share knowledge in
community.
For example, where Ashley Thomas (Craig, 2019), a recent Amer-
ican teacher participant, was concerned, she (teacher) taught students
(learners) (Li Lan, Anna Pedrana, Illich Mauro, Alejandro Rodríguez)
English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) (subject matter) at T. P. Yaeger
Middle School (milieu). But the context Ashley chose to describe was
much more expansive than the campus where she worked. She included
the Panhandle region of Texas where she spent her childhood and spoke
of de facto segregation policies (parental choice that was in effect when
her older brother went to school) which were replaced by racial desegre-
gation laws when she later attended the same campus. She additionally
talked about her private high school experience in Dallas, Texas, her
Wellesley College education in Massachusetts, and her higher educa-
tion experiences at Oxford University in England and l’Université de
Besançon in France. Ashley also spoke of her short-term work in Mexico.
This included her coming out as a lesbian and her subsequent two-year
estrangement from her parents. She additionally painted the ideolog-
ical landscape of Texas and told of how opposing political views created
acrimony in her family unit that has since echoed through the genera-
tions. Ashley further outlined how state and national policies and politics
have shaped ESL instruction and the services made available to immi-
grant youth. Taken together, milieu in my teacher attrition study with
Ashley Thomas extended far past T. P. Yaeger Middle School and way
beyond the primarily underserved students of color she championed on
her Greater Houston campus. Having provided this real-world example
of the commonplaces of curriculum, it makes sense for me to shine the
spotlight on what each commonplace takes into account before pressing

on.
As foreshadowed, Schwab had profound respect for teachers and
the pivotal role they play in the educational enterprise. He knew that
teachers “exhibit powers and deficiencies, likes and dislikes, which must
be considered if a curriculum is to be well-chosen” (Schwab, 1974,
p. 315). Therefore, the teacher is the first commonplace I will elaborate.
For Schwab, teachers are the “fountainhead[s] of the curriculum deci-
sion” (Schwab, 1983, p. 245). They are “agents of education, not [of]
subject matter” (Schwab, 1954/1978, p. 128). They open up worlds and
opportunities for learners instead of chaining them to the government-
authorized knowledge they are required to teach (Schwab, 1969). Also,
because “the public and the private cannot be separated in teaching, the
person who the teacher is surfaces in the act of teaching” (Bullough,
1989, pp. 20–21). Who teachers are as people inevitably becomes inter-
woven with what they teach (Kelchtermans, 2009). Hence, teachers work
deftly with “a lightness of touch” (Hansen, 2011, p. 4) to ensure that the
curriculum they teach is inspired by them but not about them.
The second commonplace requiring explanation is the learner.
Learners are also exceedingly important because teaching and learning
mutually inform one another. Confucius’s students affirmed this point in
the essay, “Of Education,” in the Book of Rites (Li, personal conversa-
tion, 2020). Two Mandarin characters capture teaching and learning: jiào
(教) for teaching and xué (学) for learning. However, when one speaks
about teaching, one automatically includes learning and uses the word,
jiàoxué (教学), which resonates with kèchéng (课程) being a teaching-
learning journey having more to do with life than the mastery of skills
(Wu, 2004). When I visited New Zealand for my first time, I learned
something quite similar. The Maori, New Zealand’s original inhabitants
(like Canada’s First Nations people), have a single word for teaching and
learning: ako. Ako is also steeped in natural reciprocity; it too recognizes
that the teacher and the learner cannot be separated from one another in
the curriculum making act.
For Schwab, learners are always particular learners. They enter
teaching-learning situations with “different personal histories which
confer on [them] widely varying wants and capacities for satisfaction”
(Schwab, 1959/1978, p. 172). Individual students are “more…than the
percentile ranks, social class, and personality type into which [they] fall”
10 C. J. CRAIG
(Schwab, 1973, p. 496). The learners doing the learning are different
from the teacher covering the material (Rodgers, 2020). Learners are
not only learners; they are also “personalities” (Schwab, 1974, p. 314).
Further to this, “what [learners] are, what [learners] know, how [learners]
have been bent, and what [learners] remember, determine what [learners]
experience” (Schwab, 1961/1978, p. 272) in curriculum making situa-
tions. Hence, they focus on “self-realization of one kind or another, devel-
oped capacities whose use s/he enjoys, identity, capacity for economic
self-sufficiency, and so on” (Schwab, 1974, p. 315). This means that chil-
dren—like newborns, adults, and senior citizens—are always in a state of
being and becoming (Van der Wal & Van der Bie, 2015, p. 3). As Maxine
Greene (1995) put it, we are “in the making,” but “never made.” We are
“unending…promise and project” (Gadotti, 1996, p. 7).
According to Schwab (1964), subject matter, the third commonplace,
should never be considered “familiar, fixed and at hand when needed”
(p. 2) as so often is the case. It also is not “ready-made in itself” (Dewey,
1990, p. 189). Thus, we need to approach subject matter “as fluent,
embryonic, vital” (Dewey, 2020, p. 9). One issue has to do with “pigeon-
holed” content coming to the child in ways that “fractionizes the world
for him/[her]” and rips facts away from their “original place in experience
and rearranges them with reference to some principle” (Dewey, 2020,
p. 5). Another problem is that the disciplines themselves have “no fixed
catalogue” of structure (Schwab, 1961/1978, p. 251). Hence, no one
knows the structure of the disciplines (Schwab, 1961/1978, p. 243; italics
in original) because there are no “natural joints” of content that occur
in nature (Schwab, 1980, p. 365). An associated challenge is that subject
areas like science are complex and ever changing. Part of the reason stems
from the “unclosed character of science” (Schwab, 1949, p. 263); the
other part has to do with “nature [being] so rich in matters to be learned
and scientists so apt in finding ways to learn them” (Schwab, 1960/1978,
p. 228). The same is true for history. It also is not a fixed entity because
“history …never stands still” (Wulf, 1619 Project Live Forum, 2020).
Because Schwab was aware of these and other complexities, he rebelled
against certainty—“the rhetoric of conclusions”—that stable inquirers
attribute to science and, by extrapolation, any other content area. He
believed that subject matter “facts” contained in textbooks and other
documents should be presented as “tentative formulations – not facts, but
interpretations of facts” (Schwab, 1961/1978, p. 242; italics in original).
Texts would be filled with “…uncertainties, differences in interpretation,
and issues of principle which characterize the disciplines” in Schwab’s
(1961/1978, p. 242) words. “Likely stories” (Schwab, 1976, pp. 14–15)

would result, each of which would communicate contingent “truths”—
not “gospel truth” (Jackson, 1990, p. xii)—until new discoveries are
made and “ideas that were once thought to be true…discarded” (Schwab,
1956, p. 133). This is how he envisioned content keeping up with the
times. “What is true today may not be true tomorrow” (Alexander,
2015, p. 72) clearly underpinned Schwab’s understanding of curriculum
making.
Schwab’s (1956/1978) linking of subject matter with the process of
inquiry sheds light on the fourth curriculum commonplace, milieu. In
Schwab’s view, “knowledge of a context of discourses [note: multiple
discourses; not one discourse] gives … a fuller knowledge of the scope
and meaning of the conclusions…” He declared that “if there [was]
a time when problems special to teaching science [for example] justi-
fied the omission of social studies and humanities, that time is past”
(Schwab, 1974, p. 316). Additionally, the sources of what Schwab (1973)
termed “the eclectic” are available in the milieu. Teachers draw on a wide
range of theories, standards, and traditions at their disposal. They subse-
quently employ “arts of the eclectic” to create “amalgam [s]” that aid
them in understanding educational phenomena. These “eclectic integra-
tion[s]” arise from diverse discourses (Alexander, 2015, p. 63) that range
from the historical, the political, and the meta-physical to the theoret-
ical, the conceptual, the practical, and the technical. Successfully merging
“knowing that” (understanding) with “knowing how” (making a differ-
ence) presents teachers and teaching with perpetual challenges (Ryles,
1949). Multiple, across-the-board complexities led Schwab to declare that
“To the question, how big a context? There is no clear answer. There is
yet more to know or more to know about…” (p. 153). The phrases, to
know and to know about, imply that there would be infinitely more to do
and of which to make sense. Schwab concluded, “The problems of educa-
tion arise from exceedingly complex actions, reactions, and transactions…
these doings constitute a skein of myriad threads which know no bound-
aries…” (Schwab, 1971, p. 329). They are located one within another,
he explained, like “a nest of ‘Chinese boxes’” ranging from the small
community of home and classroom, through the larger neighborhood
and school, the town and region, to the nation and the world” (Schwab,
1974, p. 314). Clearly, Schwab’s notion of milieu was like that of Dewey
who also saw the “bigger world” as a major shaping force (Schwab, 1953,
p. 113). For both, milieu was a very big tent.
12 C. J. CRAIG
Being a narrative inquirer, I would like to slip in my own reading

of the curriculum commonplaces, which further reflects the influence
that Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly have had on me as advisors.
I believe the commonplaces are inherently storied places. The teacher
and the learner do not come to curriculum making situations empty-
headed; they unavoidably bring their autobiographical narratives—their
narratives of experience (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990)—with them as
I demonstrated in my introduction to this book. Also, subject matter,
when reduced to its essence, is the most plausible narratives binding a
discipline together, particularistic stories that distinguish it from other
disciplines sitting on its boundaries. The same goes for milieu. All of
our schools, communities, regions, countries, and so forth are storied
places. Any person in a community can share their lived narrative of
a particular campus they have attended. The same goes for communi-
ties, states, countries, and belief systems. Rich social narrative histories
abound in society and necessarily inform our personal readings of how
countries and international relationships work. This brief summary of the
curriculum commonplaces readies us for a discussion of the images of
teaching, specifically the image of teacher-as-curriculum-implementer and
the image of teacher-as-curriculum-maker, which follow.
Teacher Images
Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly introduced the images of
teacher-as-curriculum-implementer and teacher-as-curriculum-maker to
the educational enterprise in 1992 (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992). The
seeds for the images, though, appeared earlier in their Teachers as
curriculum planners book (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988), which targeted
a teacher audience. The roots of both images pull on (1) educational
history—work involving stability and change and educational philosophy,
(2) Dewey’s theory about the ends and means of education, and (3)
educational leadership, which, like other facets of the literature, posi-
tions teachers as mediators between curriculum documents and student
outcomes. Additionally, the agency Tyler afforded teachers played a role,
as did Schwab’s “practical” (most especially his curriculum common-
places), which upheld the centrality of the teacher in curriculum delib-
erations and provided the underpinning for the teacher-as-curriculum-
maker image. Connelly and Clandinin’s programmatic research, which
has comprehensively aimed to understand teachers’ knowledge in their
own terms and in context, further informed the image’s creation. Both
images will now be unpacked.
Teacher-as-Curriculum-Implementer &
Teacher-as-Curriculum-Maker
The dominant image of teacher-as-curriculum-implementer (Clandinin &
Connelly, 1992) characterizes teachers as a “construct of public inter-
est” (Grunder, 2016)—“agents of the state, paid to do its bidding”
(Lent & Pipkin, 2003). In this widespread view, shifts in teachers’ prac-
tices occur because policymakers or even academicians at various levels
of educational organizations mandate changes that teachers—due to
legal requirements, subordinated positions, and/or lack of power—duti-
fully must follow. Situated near the bottom of education’s food chain,
the teacher is a “technician…receiver, transmitter, and implementer of
other people’s knowledge” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999, p. 276) and
“instructions” (Goodson, 2017, p. 5). She/he is “excluded from active
participation in development of new solutions to fundamental problems”
(McPherson, 2004, p. 8) due to the short-circuiting of their voices and
agency (Rodgers, 2020). This makes teachers the consumer in a top-
down producer-consumer framework (Aoki, 1974). Following curriculum
like a “manual” (Westbury, 2000, p. 17) or a “cookbook” (Oyoo,
2013, p. 458), teachers-as-curriculum-implementers are more “business
manager[s]” than “paradigm[s] of moral life” (Alexander, 2015, p. 27)
and “moral stewards” of schooling (Goodlad, 1999, p. 237). Instead,
they are “public functionaries” (Alexander, 2015, p. 134) bent to the
will of bureaucrats, efficiently carrying out their demands. They seem “to
know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching” (Dewey, 1904,
p. 215).
By way of contrast, teachers-as-curriculum-makers “not only…act on
their own initiative, [but they are] expected to do so.” “Tak[ing] on situ-
ation[s] for themselves” is more important to judging their quality “than
their following any particular set method or scheme” (Dewey, 1904,
pp. 27–28). Hence, the image of teacher-as-curriculum-maker (Clan-
dinin & Connelly, 1992) acknowledges the teacher as a holder, user, and
producer of knowledge who, as a moral agent and personal self, adeptly
negotiates government-authorized curriculum in active relationship with
the students in his/her care. Thus, when a teacher-as-curriculum-maker
teaches youth, the teacher brings forward for deliberation his/her knowl-
edge about himself/herself as a teacher, the course content, the reach
of the milieu, and his/her knowing of students, their relationships with
one another and their individual uniqueness. According to DeBoer,
“teachers inspire…students through accounts of personal experience or
allow students to share their own insights and opinions” (DeBoer, 2014,
14 C. J. CRAIG
p. 2444). In short, teachers with “larger experience and riper wisdom”

than the students they teach actively conceive of how “life should come
to child[ren]” (Dewey, 1897, p. 79) while engaging in active relationship
with them. Here, echoes of Clandinin and Connelly’s Schwab-inspired
teacher-as-curriculum-maker image as well as Dewey’s (1916) education
as reconstruction without end once again interconnect.
However, the near-universal image of teachers being located in an
educational conduit (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995; Craig, 2002) prevails.
In their bottom of the pipeline position, they deliver curriculum to
students like “passing on a bag of goods” (Hansen, 2011, p. 1). Further
to this, the theory of action underlying the conduit goes unchallenged
in the policy arena. Sadly, it also reigns supreme in academia due to
theory’s long-standing estrangement from practice. Professors also tell
teachers what they should be doing in the research articles they dissem-
inate, often with no contact or prior communication with teachers.
Clandinin and Connelly (2004) called these top-down approaches to
reform, “change by injection,” with each inoculation resulting in new
knowledge prescriptions for teachers to impress on students. Unfortu-
nately, externally imposed measures tend to be disconnected from what
teachers have come to know and do in the throes of their own practices.
This is highly problematic because teachers’ practices reveal their personal
practical knowledge in action, not simply what others expect of them,
although others’ expectations certainly inform the mix. Reduced to the
essence, what teachers know and do is “neither fixed, nor finished.” It has
“no changeless cent[er] to which understanding can anchor itself.” Also,
there is no “model to be copied or… idea to be realized…” (Oakshott,
1962, pp. 154–156). Teachers’ practices, reflecting their personal practical
knowledge, will always be fluid and shape-shifting. Necessarily contoured
by their own changing selves, teachers’ practices are contingent on
the learners they teach, knowledge advances in the disciplines, innova-
tions in the teaching field, unfurling social issues and crises (i.e., global
pandemic), and the educational policies influencing the context in which
their practices unfold.
The teacher-as-curriculum-maker conceptualization offers a viable
alternative to the dominant plotline of teacher-as-curriculum-
implementer. In the former conceptualization, the teacher uses other
people’s knowledge and, in a technical rationalist way, installs a
curriculum/curriculum package designed and required by others. In
short, the image of teacher-as-curriculum-implementer positions teachers
as “hand-servants” (Hansen, 2011) whose continuing employment rests

on fidelity to others’ (i.e., policymakers, academics, testing companies,
etc.) edicts. For example, in France’s normal school tradition, directives
dictated by others with more knowledge and/or authority than teachers
are explicitly labelled state knowledge and researcher knowledge (Malet,
2017).
Contrastingly, the teacher-as-curriculum-maker image requires teach-
ers’ active engagement and takes into account the critical reflectiveness
Dewey afforded them. As Schwab (1983) put it, teachers engaged in
curriculum making “must be involved in debate, deliberation, and deci-
sion about what and how to teach” (Schwab, 1983, p. 245). The image of
teacher-as-curriculum-maker fully captures the importance of the teacher
in organizing, planning, and orchestrating classroom interactions. The
teachers’ “productive impulse” (Grunder, 2016) is vital because it engages
students in the search for knowledge and cultivates their zeal to discover it
(DeBoer, 2014). The teacher-as-curriculum-maker recognizes that the
teacher is the only one at the nexus of the curricular exchange and
the only person interacting face-to-face with flesh-and-blood students.
Thus, curriculum is what ultimately happens—what becomes animated
(lived!) (Ian Westbury’s term [personal communication, 2006])—in the
moments when teaching and learning merge. In that fusion, teachers use
what is in their students (learner commonplace), their teaching situa-
tions (milieu commonplace), and themselves (teacher commonplace) to
make curriculum mostly organized around mandated content (subject
matter commonplace). Teachers’ productive impulses cannot be captured
in a codified knowledge base without ignoring the continuity of expe-
rience (Dewey, 1938) underlying the knowing teachers bring to the
curriculum making table. Herein lies the perennial rub of curriculum
and teaching/teacher education research: the confounding question of
“how to integrate theoretically based knowledge that has traditionally
been taught in university classrooms with the experience-based knowl-
edge that has traditionally been located in the practice of teachers and the
realities of classrooms and schools” (Darling Hammond, 2006, p. 307).
The teacher-as-curriculum-maker image assumes that a classroom space
exists that is not constantly surveilled by those privileging the measure-
ment and the interpretation of “behavioural data” (Zuboff, 2019, p. 53)
over what is important in education and what matters to teachers.
In this classroom space, “moments of choice” happen (Schwab, 1983,
16 C. J. CRAIG
p. 245) where teachers and students can negotiate curriculum unhin-

dered by, though not ignorant of, others’ directives and desires. That
place, however, is discretionary (Craig, 2009), which means teachers and
students need to intentionally take action to seize its possibilities. Also,
opportunities to maneuver within the classroom space are affected by
others—fellow teachers, administrators, school district personnel, staff
developers, parents, peers, and policymakers—who also have a shaping
effect on what is going on in classrooms. In the discretionary space
teachers and students jointly carve out, distinctions between the knower
and the known (Craig & Curtis, 2020; Dewey & Bentley, 1949; Fenster-
macher, 1994) dissipate when the means and ends of education intersect.
As active agents, teachers work mindfully, professionally guided by their
sensibilities and practical ways of knowing within their given policy
environments. Similarly, students participate as knowers of their own
experiences and producers of their own knowledge, not simply end users
of codified knowledge meted out to them by their teachers.
Boiled to the essence, knowledge arising from teachers’ lived experi-
ences cannot be “tested, packaged, imparted and sent like bricks across
countr[ies] to build knowledge structures that are said to accumulate”
(Eisner, 1997, p. 7) because the teacher, like the student, is integral to the
body of knowledge that exists and indispensable to the curriculum making
act. Paradoxically, teachers’ embodied knowledge scaffolds students’
embodiments of like knowledge developments (Craig et al., 2018). This
shaping and being shaped process takes place through back-and-forth
interactions, laying the groundwork for reciprocity whose root word,
reciprocus , means give-and-take actions for mutual benefit—with mutual
(reciprocal) benefit being the pearl of great price.
In the end, the teacher is “the most responsive creator of curriculum”
because he/she “negotiates the formal planned curriculum of government
and publishers within his/her practice, alongside the lives of learners”
(Murphy & Pushor, 2010, p. 658). In short, teachers “take it [prescribed
curriculum] and develop it within the range and scope of the child’s life”
(Dewey, 2020, p. 24). This is because curriculum documents are not
brought to bear in some archetypal classroom, as proponents of standards

and accountability lead us to believe, but in a particular locus in time and
space with smells, shadows, seats and conditions outside its walls which
may have much to do with what is achieved inside. (Schwab, 1970, p. 35)
Thus, in the teacher-as-curriculum-maker image, attention necessarily

reverts from written plans, authorized textbooks, and politicized govern-
ment mandates that typically privilege the subject matter commonplace
and assign teachers to purveyor of knowledge roles, to curriculum as
it is lived in the context and specificities of people’s lives (Downey &
Clandinin, 2010). This automatically returns us to the confluence of the
curriculum commonplaces mediated by the teacher. And, in sharp contrast
to lists of codified knowledge—abstracted from context, extracted from
persons, and devoid of relationship—what emerges are vital aspects of
teacher knowledge, matters that are “ephemeral, passionate, shadowy and
significant…for the most part…reflect[ing] teachers’ lives” (Connelly &
Clandinin, 2004, p. 42).
Curriculum Making in Action

To capture teachers’ live curriculum making experiences, I now spot-
light the images of teachers-as-curriculum-makers and teachers-as-
implementers brushing up against one another in the context of
four American teachers’ pedagogical practices. Daryl Wilson (literacy
department head—20-year research participant), Bernadette Lohle (art
teacher—13-year research participant), Helen Macalla (physical education
teacher/mentor—3-year research participant), and 4) Anna Dean (begin-
ning literacy teacher—6-year research participant) are the teachers whose
curriculum making experiences I feature. After that, I synthesize what
these four teachers’ experiences convey about curriculum making and the
tensions between the root images of teacher-as-curriculum-implementer
and teacher-as-curriculum-maker before I move on to sharing observa-
tions in Chinese classrooms along with an overarching commentary about
curriculum making in Chapter 2.
Daryl Wilson (1997–2017)

My longitudinal research with Daryl Wilson has been marked by six
different reforms that took place at T. P. Yaeger Middle School between
1997 and 2017. Each of these change efforts enhanced or detracted
from Daryl’s curriculum making, which in turn, added or subtracted
from his possible growth as a teacher. This is because learning has the
capacity to “diminish the mind as well as expand it” (Eisner, 1982, p. 13).
18 C. J. CRAIG
Also, none of the change efforts was discrete. Each had other develop-
ments that concurrently happened. The reforms in question were: (1)
standardized teaching methods (models of teaching) (1997–2000), (2)
standardized teacher communities (professional learning communities)
(2002–2006), (3) standardized teaching practices (readers and writers
workshop) (2007–2009), (4) standardized teacher evaluation (school
district digitized format) (2009–2012), (5) standardized workbooks
(testing company-produced) (2013–2015), and (6) standardized pay-
for-performance (value-added measures) (2015–2017). As foreshadowed,
each presents struggles between teachers’ assigned roles as implementers
and their personal and professional desires to be curriculum makers.
When I first began working with Daryl Wilson and other teachers in
his department, the models of teaching change effort was underway. This
meant that Daryl could not draw on his personal repository of teacher
knowledge nor on his teaching sensibilities to instruct his students in
a manner pleasing to him as a middle school literacy teacher. On the
contrary, he was required to demonstrate one of six teaching models that
a state staff developer required him to use when she entered his classroom.
As might be expected, Daryl and his colleagues found this approach
insulting because it directly affronted their abilities to be curriculum
makers. Below is a discussion that took place between Charles, a sixth-
grade literacy teacher, and Daryl, who was an eighth-grade literacy teacher
as well as the literacy department chair. This passage is one of several that
are illustrative of the teachers’ dissatisfaction with the models they were
required to use as curriculum implementers:
Charles: The lesson models are moving in the opposite direction to teacher
empowerment. They are so prescribed that they take away our empow-
erment. This year is such a mixed bag – imaging coming in the middle
of two class periods and making judgments [about teachers’ practices].
Later …
Charles: There is this mirroring thing here that is not collaborative. It

means doing what they expect us to do. It does not give individuals
credit for their own smarts.
Daryl: I resent having to play the game. People cannot be worked with like
they, and their knowledge and experiences, are interchangeable parts
(Craig, 2001, p. 321)
Because the models of teaching were expected to be implemented

“cleanly, not creatively” (staff developer’s words), they eventually were
“shelved” (teachers’ expression) but not before several teachers, including
the principal, exited the school, with some leaving the profession alto-
gether. Upon her departure, the principal declared that the models of
teaching reform revealed the extent to which those working in schools
(teachers and administrators alike) are “on the short end of the stick.”
Daryl and other teachers in his department were then required to
participate in another change initiative: professional learning communi-
ties (PLCs). On this occasion, the school district formally announced that
it would “implement professional learning communities [PLCs]…and
give administrators the tools needed to create PLCs throughout the
district” (School District, 2007). The district specifically spoke of imple-
mentation and, by definition, privileged principals’ versions of teacher
community not the natural versions of teacher knowledge communities
that existed prior to the administrative imposition of PLCs on them.
However, this was not initially a problem because Yaeger’s principal
was brand-new. He allowed the literacy teachers to organize themselves
into small study groups, which were essentially their versions of a PLC.
In these self-selected, self-styled knowledge communities (Craig, 1995a,
1995b, 2007), they responded as curriculum makers to two books in their
subject area: The art of teaching reading (Calkins, 2001) and Mosaic of
thought: Teaching comprehension in a readers workshop (Keene & Zimmer-
mann, 1997). This was part-and-parcel of what other teachers termed
“the halcyon days” of school change in Greater Houston (Craig et al.,
2020). Below is how one group of teachers captured what they learned
as curriculum makers from their group-directed professional development
experiences:
Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading,
It had no pictures or conversations in it,
‘and what is the use of the book’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or
conversations.’
(From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll)
And we ask ourselves,
with the art of reading teaching
before our eyes and beyond our reach,
how?
How to teach questioning,
how to teach visualizing,
how to teach wondering,
20 C. J. CRAIG
how to teach connecting,

to the child with no questions,
no wonders,
no connections,
and no pictures or conversations
peeping and whispering
from the pages of the book
Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found
herself falling
down what seemed to be
a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly,
for she had plenty of time as she went down to look at her,
And to wonder what was going to happen next.
So far, we see that the more deeply Yaeger’s literacy teachers reflected on
their situations, the more their questions emerged and the more memo-
ries they called forth for the purposes of interpretation. Their writing
continued:
Flipping back to remembered pages

Gliding our fingers across the lines
We reread
To ourselves
To each other,
Connecting Calkins to classroom,
Keene to colleagues,
and text to students,
we wonder
is the data accurate,
or does it become curiousor and curiousor
the closer you look?
Are we teaching a test, a text,
Or a student?
And we question
What does Calkins mean by
‘a curriculum of talk’
and Keene by
‘a mosaic of thought’
and with these questions stirring the air…
As foreshadowed, questions continued to “stir in the air” for the Yaeger

teachers. This time around, though, they directly addressed the theses of
Calkins’ and Keene’s books and moved toward resolution of what up to

now has been lived and named tensions:
She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her.
‘Why, it’s a Looking-Glass book, of course!
And if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.’
The teachers’ ah-hah movement presaged the literacy teachers’ own

conclusions:
And then we laugh,

And breathe,
And realize
We will teach them to do
What we do as readers
To touch the text with our fingers,
To question the text with our curiosity,
To visualize the text with our pictures,
To connect the text with our lives,
And to enter that Wonderland that is
Reading.
And Alice knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden
you ever
saw. (Craig, 2010, pp. 428–429)
However, despite the teachers’ powerful poetry writing, a major problem

persisted. The Yaeger literacy teachers collectively presented challenges as
learners in addition to their considerable strengths. They, like the students
whom they taught, were not learning how to teach using readers and
writers workshop (subject matter) at a uniform rate. Further to this, the
learning of neither the teachers nor the students could be blueprinted.
This deeply concerned their new principal who had awakened to the fact
of what a revolving one-year contract from his school district (milieu)
meant where his career advancement was concerned. He knew he could
potentially lose his job if the Yaeger teachers did not perform in ways that
statistically increased students’ accountability test scores. Hence, he stan-
dardized and accelerated the literacy teachers’ use of readers and writers
workshop, which was the next reform he instituted, also through funding
Yaeger received from a philanthropy. To expedite his efforts, he hired a
literacy staff developer (a teacher of teachers) from an east-coast state.
Soon, all the teachers at each grade level were teaching the same content
22 C. J. CRAIG
in the same way and commonly assessing their students’ progress. Conse-
quently, Daryl Wilson, who had previously created and taught a highly
meaningful Holocaust literacy unit4 in which his students and he were
deeply invested, had to ditch it in favor of a unit of study that the literacy
staff developer prescribed. Further to this, the staff developer and others
visited each classroom 20–50 times per year with the others being school
administrators, teachers in the department and school guests. On one
such visit, the staff developer told Daryl Wilson in front of his peers, his
administrators, and a handful of school guests that his students were the
“worst GT (gifted & talented) class” she had ever observed. This judg-
mental comment, which cut deeply into the heart of his practice, was
highly problematic to Daryl as a teaching professional. It also irritated
his colleagues who likewise faced public condemnations in front of their
students and peers. Daryl’s colleague, Laura Curtis, explained:
…the way it was done with all of these people with clipboards and the
microscopic way they came in and zeroed in on [a teacher] and one
child. And the children [particularly those who were English-as-a-second-
language learners and possibly offspring of undocumented workers] were
very nervous.
Laura went on to say:
The staff developer had a way of putting you on the spot saying, “Why
do you do this?” “Why do your kids need that?” And everything was an
instant demand…All of a sudden you are thinking I have got to answer
this person. I’ve got to answer this individual because the individual wants
an answer now—and if I do not give the right answer, then the person will
get mad at me in front of my principal, peers, and children and say ugly
things to me.
The change effort that followed freed the teachers from “the hand-
cuffs” (Daryl’s expression) the staff developer placed on the teachers’
workshop teaching, but even more greatly threatened their overall abilities
to be curriculum makers. The incoming reform had to do with standard-
ized teacher assessments. These assessments came after the school had
experienced an almost complete leadership change. Only one assistant
4 Daryl Wilson personally traveled to Israel and the death camps in Europe to learn
about the Holocaust and victims’ experiences.
principal with one year of experience remained. Unfortunately, a begin-

ning assistant principal with elementary school experience was assigned
responsibility for Yaeger’s middle school literacy department. His content
area was not reading or writing. To make matters worse, the school
district had concurrently adopted a value-added approach to teacher
assessment. This meant that teachers’ evaluations would be linked statis-
tically to students’ high stakes accountability test scores. Further to this,
the school appeared to have a limited number of points available for distri-
bution among its high-performing faculty. This resulted in the teachers
receiving less points and poorer evaluations than previously had been the
case. Hence, Daryl dropped 20 points, another teacher reported a loss of
27 points, and Anna Dean, the beginning teacher I discuss later, received
a score significantly lower than her previous years as well. As with the
previous reforms, more specially prepared teachers left Yaeger. Also, two
new back-to-back principals joined the campus leadership team and left
shortly thereafter. With multiple school districts operating in the densely
populated area, employment was easy to obtain elsewhere, particularly if
you were a strong teacher as faculty at Yaeger historically had been.
The fifth reform that Daryl Wilson experienced in my twenty-year
continuum at the campus pertained to standardized workbooks. The
rationale for this change was unknown. It may have occurred because
the district was hiring mostly alternately certified teachers lacking in field
experience and knowledge of curriculum mandates. Viewed another way,
the problem could have been parents threatening lawsuits for their chil-
dren’s failures to enter universities of their dreams. Package deals with
book publishers may also have been a contributing factor. I do not know.
Whatever the reason/s, Daryl and his colleagues were required to choose
one of two expendable workbooks published by testing companies, each
of which cost $50 per student annually (1500 x $50 = $7500 per annum
for the campus). The Yaeger teachers agreed on one workbook; the
district superintendent dictated that the school purchase the other one.
While Daryl as department chair found the assigned workbooks reason-
ably “okay” (his word), he did not personally use them as part of his
classroom instruction. Instead, he, like other members of his department,
continued to embed the mechanics of writing and spelling in the writers
workshop shell that the campus had adopted and perfected. Hence, Daryl,
like the other teachers in his department, hid the workbooks because
students and parents had complained they were too clumsy for home-
work use. Consequently, the workbooks could be found behind novel
24 C. J. CRAIG
sets in classroom libraries, stacked behind pillows or curtains, or stored in

covered chests. Other than consuming precious space in Yaeger’s smaller-
than-usual classrooms, the workbooks wasted public taxpayers’ dollars.
The workbooks thrust teachers into teacher-as-curriculum-implementer
roles because the workbooks could be both curriculum and resource.
However, the Yaeger literacy faculty found creative ways to maneuver
around them so the expendable books neither became the curriculum nor
served the purposes of curriculum implementation. In short, they capital-
ized on their moments of choice because they knew that “no command
or instruction can be so formulated as to control…artistic judgment or
behavior…” (Schwab, 1983, p. 245)
Next came the final literacy reform I studied, the decisive factor
that ended Daryl’s career. Daryl Wilson, like the other Yaeger teachers,
received monetary bonuses as a matter of course because literacy was a
tested school subject and his students, contrary to the staff developer’s
searing criticism, were mostly performing well on the state’s standard-
ized reading and writing tests. Unfortunately, however, another new
principal—Daryl’s seventh since I had known him (9th overall)—was
appointed to the campus in the interim. Before the new school year
began, she decided to remove Daryl from his department chair position.
Her stated reason (cover story?) was that Daryl had received less of a
value-added bonus in the previous year than he did in the years before.
She apparently did not take into account that Daryl worked with different
groups of students in different years and accordingly received different
bonuses. Alternately, the principal’s concern about Daryl’s changes in
bonuses/student test scores could have been a thinly guised ruse for
age discrimination. Whatever the case may have been, Daryl came to the
realization that:
This is what we have come to…

There is no other way to explain it…
Data is [G]od…. (Craig, 2020, p. 1)
Knowing there was “nowhere to go from here” (Craig, 2020, p. 10),

Daryl Wilson resigned from his department chair and teaching posi-
tions, bringing his years of teaching and teacher leadership at one of
the most venerable middle schools in the southern US to a close. Once
again, a clash between curriculum implementation and curriculum making
happened, this time with the tyranny of metrics being used in “dysfunc-
tional and oppressive way[s]” (Mueller, 2018, p. xvii) that left Daryl “on
the short end of the stick” without title, and continuing employment and
entering a new phase of life where his identity was concerned.
Bernadette Lohle (1998–2011)

Like Daryl Wilson, Bernadette Lohle was an experienced teacher who
worked in a school district adjacent to his city center one. While both
districts were issued federal court orders to desegregate their students
and teachers, Daryl’s district integrated its minority Black and majority
white populations more expeditiously and settled its case, which remains a
sealed, historical document to this day. Bernadette’s district, on the other
hand, failed to comply and the case was re-opened about two decades
later. The unsettled decree had to do with a particular neighborhood,
the neighborhood where Bernadette’s campus, Cochrane Academy, was
located. Settled by African Americans, it was part of the most populous
Black communities outside of Harlem. The large concentration of chil-
dren of color coupled with the district’s ongoing federal lawsuit meant
that Cochrane easily qualified as a school reform site and was able to
acquire a large sum of funding over a five-year period (1997–2002). The
school was also the recipient of a $1 million federal arts grant due to its
high priority needs. I played leading roles in both endeavors. The second
five-year award (2000–2005) is the one mainly discussed here.
As Cochrane’s senior arts teacher and program chair, Bernadette Lohle
taught and led the school’s nationally recognized arts program, which,
according to its request for funding proposal, was to be spread within its
district, the larger community and across the country. From the outset,
Bernadette was dismayed that the funding agency termed her Grounds for
Learning project a “dissemination” effort:
There is something about the word, dissemination—like the word,

seminal —that is totally and utterly wrong… We need new ways to describe
how ideas become shared. Perhaps then we could more ably understand
what happens and what needs to happen in order for teachers to share
knowledge in ways that are helpful. (Craig, 2006, p. 257)
While it was a grant program expectation that Bernadette would func-

tion as a curriculum implementer in the arts program dissemination, she
26 C. J. CRAIG
personally considered herself a curriculum maker modeling a story of how

others could make curriculum alongside elementary school children as she
had done throughout her career. Most specifically,
…Grounds for Learning moves the child from the confines of the
traditional classroom of four walls of learning to the outside…school envi-
ronment. It was developed to heighten children’s awareness of the diversity
of cultures and their history, while exploring topics that invite the integra-
tion of the disciplines. Through these experiences, [Cochrane’s faculty]
would assist children in understanding the uniqueness of individuals, as
well as nurturing respect for the very foundation on which history is built.
(Craig, 2006, p. 277)
However, the word, dissemination, and the focus of the project were
not the only challenges that Bernadette faced. Her principal, who fully
supported the arts and arts-based teaching at Cochrane, also resigned to
take up a prestigious leadership position in the city. This was about the
time the Grounds for Learning grant was launched. Further to this, the
high stakes testing agenda, which began in Texas, had become federal law
(U.S. Department of Education, 2002). Hence, accountability demands
were increasing. Given the significant changes in the broader educational
policy milieu, the school district opted for a different leadership focus
at Cochrane Academy. Unlike Bernadette’s past principal who uncon-
ditionally championed the arts, her new principal called the arts “fluff”
(her word) to offset hard-nosed instruction in “tested subject areas.”
Needless to say, Bernadette’s (and the other teachers’) desires to make
curriculum alongside children collided with the prevailing administra-
tive imperative that instrumentally focused on test score improvement.
This shift in orientation effectively made the standardized state exams the
Cochrane children’s curriculum. In the passage that follows, Bernadette
and I discussed what transpired as this change unfolded:
Bernadette: It (the arts/arts-based learning philosophy) was slowly chipped

away by people who did not understand the relevance of the program
from the beginning….
Researcher: Mm-hmm…
Bernadette: …who did not know what the vision was, and thought that it
was arbitrary.
Researcher: And then some strong themes like testing and accountability
came into play?
Bernadette: Exactly. And then a kind of power struggle ensued—the

arts…we knew what our role was supposed to be and we were not
going to change that. We were not going to be dessert. And we were
not going to be “fluff.”…There is a big difference between quality and
fluff, and you have to know the difference. (Craig, 2006, pp. 274–275)
Bernadette continued:
And some people think that when you put on a production and you just
see the end results that it only took a week’s time. But what they do not
realize in the arts is that we have planned for that performance for the
entire year… It is knowing what quality is…and it is a sequential learning
process. And you teach more than the arts. Every lesson you teach history.
Every lesson you work on involves forms of proportional measurement.
And with color, you are constantly working with the science of the world,
how color affects the human eye and human emotions. In short, you are
learning about life. (Craig, 2006, p. 275)
As a curriculum maker, Bernadette focused her attention on her

oeuvre: quality teaching and learning. Her principal, on the other
hand, was instrumentalist in her outlook: she simply wanted the federal
grant deliverables out of the way so full attention could be placed
on Cochrane’s students passing their state accountability tests. Hence,
Bernadette’s principal insisted that she “get the lesson plans done.” It
was clear that “coverage...[drove her] train” (Rodgers, 2020, p. 14).
She placated Bernadette by saying that the units “did not need to be
perfect,” which further irritated Bernadette (Craig, 2006, p. 19) who
had self-acknowledged perfectionist tendencies. This further heightened
the conflict between the two women because the writing of lesson plans
would not accomplish what Bernadette had set out to do. What she
wanted was to find a creative way to share her knowledge of the arts and
the way she went about arts-based teaching. Also, Bernadette had figured
out that disseminated products, if they were to be impactful, needed to be
arts-based. She knew they had to “create experiences” rather than “com-
municate messages” (Dewey, 1934, p. 104) as her principal was requiring
her to do. A teacher new to Cochrane captured the school’s ethos when
experience drove the curriculum and teachers’ curriculum making rested
on their sensibilities not on the edicts raining down on them from the
administrative conduit above:
28 C. J. CRAIG
When I first saw [Cochrane’s] students [in action]—it was a little noisier
than usual, but what I saw was not so much the noise of goofing off and
not being on task, but the noise of learning. I saw a lot of hands-on, a
lot of collaborative group learning. A lot of fine arts and visual arts and a
great deal of [subject] integration. (Olson & Craig, 2009b, p. 563)
However, the mother of all Black swan events5 —September 11,

2001—happened not long after that and interrupted everything at
Cochrane Academy; indeed, everyday life as Americans had known it. In
response, the world paused to pay tribute to the many Americans whose
lives were lost or torn apart. Bernadette Lohle, who had been born and
raised in Brooklyn, took the catastrophe especially hard. In the midst of
the all-consuming national crisis, Bernadette and her students directed
their artistic attention and energies toward the creation of a mural befit-
tingly called The Shadows of New York. The mural began as a simple
shading lesson. However, the mundane activity became a profound curric-
ular experience for the Cochrane Academy youth. The mural illustrated
how “dumb matter… [takes on] meaning” (Dewey, 1972, p. 292).
While this powerful learning experience was taking place, Bernadette’s
administrators repeatedly inquired whether her students were sufficiently
prepared to write their standardized examinations in the main content
areas. She was further questioned whether her students’ instructional
time outdoors and in the art studio could have been better spent in
their desks “bubbling in answers on practice tests.” To add salt to the
wound, Bernadette was grilled with questions about the mural’s value
and meaning—as if this was not self-evident.
Once completed, The Shadows of New York, which covered the exterior
wall of Cochrane Academy’s front entrance, was shipped to New York as
originally planned (see Fig. 1.2 for a photo given to me by Bernadette
Lohle and used with permission).
Children’s heartfelt messages accompanied the package:
The Shadows of New York is about putting New Yorkers’ hearts together
again. I hope our mural works. (Jessica)
We are sending this mural as a memorial to those of you who lost
someone. (Jeronimo)
5 This was how I heard the events of September 11, 2001 described by a British citizen
when I attended a conference in the UK.
Fig. 1.2 The Shadow of New York mural (Courtesy of Bernadette Lohle)
We hope The Shadows of New York lifts your spirits and helps you to
move on. (Alex)
We hope our drawing makes your hearts sing. (Alberto) (Craig, 2006,
p. 280)
In a special ceremony, New York City’s then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani

accepted the children’s curriculum making product on behalf of the citi-
zens of New York. After that, The Shadows of New York was featured on
local, state, and national newscasts and blazed the cover of an impor-
tant Wall Street magazine. New Yorkers also personally corresponded with
Cochrane’s students. Some even created scholarships for the children in
their school’s name as the generative nature of the profound curriculum
making experience spilled over to other facets of life and imagined futures
for America and America’s underserved children of color.
In the background, the questions posed by Cochrane’s administrator
took a different tact. This time Bernadette was asked why she had not
insisted that the mural be returned to Texas. Apparently, the principal
now wanted it displayed in the school district’s front foyer. While this was
going on, Bernadette unpacked what the mural experience had taught her
about curriculum making:
• [it] was not a lesson, nor even a unit…it did not fit a lesson plan
template….it involved months of building and layering
• it was not clear cut…it went in all directions…
30 C. J. CRAIG
• it was a happening…and a great deal more was happening than what

happened (Craig, 2006, p. 282)
Bernadette also reflected on the lesson plans she was supposed to

write. She recognized that the lessons would have made curriculum
implementers of other teachers if she had shown fidelity to the funder’s
implementation agenda. She reiterated:
The writing of the lessons [was] not the essence. It was the work that
came out of it… The “bones” of the lessons simply cannot be dupli-
cated… Teachers need to have the passion to enter into the work; they
need to experience the emotions themselves to be able to engage the
students…They need to be attentive to what transpires…just a flat lesson
plan is not helpful…What was happening was much more powerful than a
template could ever be. (Craig, 2006, p. 285)
Infuriated by the “pressure-cooker…situation,” Bernadette did not hold

back on her synopsis of what she had learned from The Shadows of New
York experience:
There was something cold about what [was] done…the way children
[were] being manipulated, the way art [was] being controlled, the use
of art for testing purposes. Life is more than a mere numbers game. We
need to remember that World War II was a number; September 11 will
go down in history as [a number] too… Life does not come down to a
score on a standardized test. Through focusing on numbers, we are totally
missing the picture. (Craig, 2006, p. 285)
Here, Bernadette echoed Milli (2014) who likewise spoke of “…[people]

in jail being given a number; people in concentration campus having
numbers; systems reducing people to numbers…” (p. 48).
When Bernadette arrived at her disturbing realization, she resigned
from her teaching position at Cochrane Academy. Her Grounds for
Learning experience had amply informed her that “[the school’s commit-
ment to the arts] was just not there” (her words). At the core of her
being, she knew that children’s artwork is not a “diversion or side issue.”
Rather, it is “the most educational of all human activities” because it holds
the power to “pierce the veil and give sense to…reality beyond appear-
ances…” (Murdoch, 1970, pp. 87–88). This most certainly was the case
with Bernadette Lohle’s arts dissemination grant experience and her 09-
11-2001-induced Shadows of New York mural that traveled to the heart
of a national wound in a valiant effort to heal it.
Helen Macalla (2008–2011)

Like Daryl Wilson and Bernadette Lohle, Helen Macalla was also an expe-
rienced teacher. She, like Daryl and Bernadette, migrated to Texas from a
different region of the US. While Daryl moved from the Deep South and
Bernadette came from the East Coast, Helen arrived from the Mid-West.
She became a Physical Education (PE) teacher in the Mid-South when
employment in her specialty area was no longer available to her in the
mid-western US.
In Greater Houston, Helen Macalla’s career mostly blossomed despite
her being in a male-dominated profession that caused her to feel like “a
lone wolf.” Eventually, she became a co-department chair of an experi-
mental PE program with Randy, her male counterpart, who shared beliefs
similar to her about their chosen subject area. Their freshly minted, inte-
grated PE program was far removed from street-corner PE that focuses
on some iteration of throwing balls, developing competitive sports teams,
and preparing professional athletes. What Randy and Helen created was
“Hiding the Physical of Education.” What their program boiled down
to was PE experienced through everyday life activities; that is, PE with
the usual sweat and grind disguised. This is how Helen described the
underlying rationale of “Hiding the Physical of Education”:
Helen: I call it camouflaging the activity. They do not realize that they are
actively working at something [a stated unit objective]…
Researcher: But they are enjoying it…
Helen: They have a good time doing it. And, all of a sudden, we give them
a traditional test and they find out, “I know something….” (Craig, You,
& Oh, 2017, p. 764)
Unfortunately, the innovative program came to a screeching halt when

Randy accepted employment at a private high school so that his daughter
could receive free tuition there. About this time, the school district
rethought the experimental school concept and decided to return it
to status quo teaching and learning. Heartbroken over the “death” of
Randy’s and her PE program, Helen quit teaching to take up a second
32 C. J. CRAIG
passion: fish. While her intention had always been to own an exotic fish
store, her plan did not materialize because an economic downturn hit
the energy-dependent economy of the city. Consequently, Helen began
work at Pet Smart. One day, one of the most difficult youths she had ever
taught showed up at the store to purchase a pet. When he saw Helen
working there, he inquired as to why she had left teaching, a question she
found utterly preposterous for him to ask. The student then proceeded to
tell her about his deep regrets about her leaving the teaching profession,
regrets apparent in the field note below:
Without [Helen], he confessed, he might not have made it to [a Tier 1]

university… He told [her]: I think of you every day because something
happened to me when you taught me.” He went on to say, “Will you do
me a favor and return to teaching?” (Craig et al., 2017, p. 763)
As a person of faith, Helen equated this young man’s re-appearance in

her life as a sign from God. This is how our conversation continued to
unfold:
Researcher: So you came back to teaching a second time and knew where
you needed to be….
Helen: Yes, I am listening now. I was sent the worst person in my entire
life to visit me and to give me direction….Thank you, Lord (glancing
upward)
Researcher: That is phenomenal, is it not?
Helen: Well, He [God] had to get my attention somehow… I am now in
a very good place… It [PE teaching] is my gift… (Craig et al., 2017,
p. 766)
Hence, when Helen returned to teaching, she adjusted her perspective

considerably:
Helen: I have already built a PE program, so I have met that goal… I do

not care if I ever build another program. I do not care if I am ever
named Teacher of the Year. These things do not motivate me. Neither
do I want to be a PE Chair again. (Craig et al., 2017, p. 766)
Helen joined a six-member PE Department with both female and

male teachers representing each grade level. She found herself unoffi-
cially paired with JD, an African American beginning teacher who had
previously played football on a university varsity team. While it was
not mandatory that the two of them team teach, teaching pairs typi-
cally collaborated with one another from time-to-time. Additionally, it
is important to note that a male department member was JD’s official
mentor, but that relationship possibly did not work out because of back-
ground rivalries concerning who would coach the football team (i.e., the
returning coach/coaches or the football player).
Researcher: So how did you start, you know, to mentor JD?

Helen: He originally had a different mentor at the beginning of the year.
And then another [male teacher] become his official mentor. And JD
and I began to spend a lot of time planning things together or talking
together, and he and I got along really well. So, the unwritten rules
that no one really talks about, I’ll share with him. So that’s how he and
I got closer; because people were expecting things from him, but he
didn’t have any experience…Because we are all brought up differently
in PE, you know…
Researcher: Being a mentor takes up so much time…
Helen: I think I see it more as us just talking about things… I do not see
it as a [burden] ….
Researcher: Is there benefit?
Helen: Yes, I get things from him. I mean he is young…He is fresh… I get
to see him as a young person dealing with the students because students
react to younger people better than they do to older people…I’m
watching him to see what he’s doing that really excites the students—
things I can imitate and put into my life to make my students have the
same thrills that his students do… (Craig et al., 2017, p. 777)
Helen’s mentoring of JD was tethered to her personal image of

teaching as a strand of pearls, which she introduced in a conversation:
Helen: You know…I have been here for four years. I think most people are
aware that what I do is rigorous. You know, I am happy with the baby
steps. Like I told JD, you know it is all about the pearls. You make a
pearl necklace. You add a few pearls each year.
Researcher: Hmm…
34 C. J. CRAIG
Helen: And he goes: “Man, you have a long string…” And I go: “Well,
the strand keeps growing… Teaching is a strand of pearls…”
Researcher: Right, wonderful… So, you are thinking your teaching is ‘a
strand of pearls’?
Helen: Right. A strand of pearls… (Craig et al., 2017, p. 767)
The conversation continued to unfurl his way:
Researcher: JD’s not into pearls?

Helen: No, he has no problem with that… You know some guys would
go, “What would I want to do with pearls?” But JD sees what I am
[figuratively] talking about…He knows: “She’s not into pearls either,
but it is a way to talk about her pedagogy….”
Researcher: There is this whole sense of doing and inquiring and….
continuous flow and development….
Helen: Nobody wants to talk about [inexpensive] keys on a chain….The
want to talk about something valuable…Pearls are valuable… (Craig
et al., 2017, p. 767)
The topic of teaching as a strand of pearls came up on other occasions

as well such as in the following two instances:
Interaction 1
Helen: JD said to me one time: “But I don’t do everything you do…”

And I said:
JD… and like I told Cheryl Craig, “it’s about the pearl.” You can
buy—can only afford one or two pearls a year. I said; “By the time
you have as many years of experiences as I have, “you will have many
pearls.” But you need to worry about a few this year… I said to him,
“Your football unit, that’s your pearl.” (Craig et al., 2017, p. 767)
Interaction 2
Helen: [JD’s] doing a whole lot more. He’s doing a really good job… I
said to him, ‘Right now, you are creating…. I call it ‘making a strand
of pearls.’ Every year, you add something great to what you teach. I
said, “Well, you know, you made two pearls this year?” JD said: “I did?
What did I do?” I said, “Well, you know your football thing was a big
pearl…”
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It was not very far from sunset, and the small birds were already
singing among the boughs, and the deep shadow—the antique and
neglected air and the silence of the place—gave it, in his romantic
eyes, a character of monastic mystery and enchantment.
As he gazed straight up the dark walk towards the house,
suddenly a man turned the corner of the yew hedge that met the
bridge’s parapet close to him, and walking straight up to the door,
with a gruff look at the little boy, shut and locked the wooden door in
his face.
So all was gone for the present. He knew there was no good in
looking through the key-hole, for envious fortune had hung a spray of
sweetbriar so as effectually to intercept the view, and nothing
remained but the dingy chocolate-coloured planks before him, and
the foliage and roses trembling over the old wall.
Many a time again he passed and re-passed the door without a
like good hap.
At length, however, one evening he found the envious wooden
door once more open, and the view again disclosed through the iron
bars.
A very pretty little girl, with golden hair, was standing on tip-toe
near, and with all her soul was striving to reach an apple with a stick
which she held in her tiny fingers.
Seeing him she fixed her large eyes on him, and said, with an air
of command—
“Come, and climb up the tree and get me that apple.”
His heart beat quick—there was nothing he liked better.
“But I can’t get in,” he said, blushing; “the door is locked.”
“Oh! I’ll call mamma—she’ll let you in. Don’t you know mamma?”
“No, I never saw her,” answered the boy.
“Wait there, and I’ll fetch her.”
And so she was gone.
The first flutter of his excitement was hardly over when he heard
steps and voices near, and the little girl returned, holding the hand of
a slight, pale lady, with a very pretty face, dressed all in black. She
had the key in her hand, and smiled gently on the little boy as she
approached. Her face was kind, and at once he trusted her.
“Oh! he has left the inner door open again,” she said, and with a
little nod and smile of welcome she opened the door, and the boy
entered the garden.
Both doors were now shut.
“Look up, little boy,” said the lady in black, with a very sweet voice.
She liked his face. He was a very handsome little fellow, and with
an expression earnest, shy, and bright, and the indescribable
character of refinement too in his face. She smiled more kindly still,
and placing just the tip of her finger under his chin she said—
“You are a gentleman’s son, and you are nicely dressed. What is
your name?”
“My papa’s name is Mr. Henry,” he answered.
“And where do you go to school?”
“I don’t go to school. I say lessons to Mr. Wharton—about half a
mile from this.”
“It is great fun, I suppose, playing with the little boys—cricket, and
all that?”
“I’m not allowed to play with the little boys.”
“Who forbids you?”
“My friends won’t allow me.”
“Who are your friends?”
“I never saw them.”
“Really! and don’t you live with your papa?”
“No, I live with Marjory.”
“Do you mean with your mamma?”
“Oh, no. She died a long time ago.”
“And is your papa rich—why aren’t you with him?”
“He was rich, Granny says, but he grew poor.”
“And where is he now?”
“I don’t know. I’m to go to school,” he said, acquiring confidence
the more he looked in that sweet face. “My friends will send me, in
three years, Granny says.”
“You are a very nice little boy, and I’m sure a good little fellow.
We’ll have tea in a few minutes—you must stay and drink tea with
us.”
The little fellow held his straw hat in his hand, and was looking up
in the face of the lady, whose slender fingers were laid almost
caressingly on his rich brown hair as she looked down smiling, with
eyes in which “the water stood.” Perhaps these forlorn childhoods
had a peculiar interest for her.
“And it is very polite of you taking off your hat to a lady, but put it
on again, for I’m not a bit better than you; and I’ll go and tell them to
get tea now. Dulcibella,” she called. “Dulcibella, this little friend is
coming to drink tea with us, and Amy and he will play here till it
comes, and don’t mind getting up, sit quiet and rest yourself.”
And she signed with her hand, smiling, to repress her attempt to
rise.
“Well, darling, play in sight o’ me, till your mamma comes back,”
said the rheumatic old woman, addressing the little girl; “and ye
mustn’t be pulling at that great rolling-stone; ye can’t move it, and ye
may break your pretty back trying.”
With these and similar injunctions the children were abandoned to
their play.
He found this pretty young lady imperious, but it was pleasant to
be so commanded, and the little boy climbed trees to gather her
favourite apples, and climbed the garden wall to pluck a bit of
wallflower, and at last she said—
“Now, we’ll play ninepins. There’s the box, set them up on the
walk. Yes, that’s right; you have played; who taught you?”
“Granny.”
“Has Granny ninepins?”
“Yes, ever so much bigger than these.”
“Really! So Granny is rich, then?”
“I think so.”
“As rich as mamma?”
“Her garden isn’t so big.”
“Begin, do you; ah, ha! you’ve hit one, and who plays best?”
“Tom Orange does; does your mamma know Tom Orange?”
“I dare say she does. Dulcibella, does mamma know Tom
Orange?”
“No, my dear.”
“No, she doesn’t,” echoed the little girl, “who is he?”
What, not know Tom Orange! How could that be? So he narrated
on that brilliant theme.
“Tom Orange must come to tea with mamma, I’ll tell her to ask
him,” decided the young lady.
So these little wiseacres pursued their game, and then had their
tea, and in about an hour the little boy found himself trudging home,
with a sudden misgiving, for the first time, as to the propriety of his
having made these acquaintances without Granny’s leave.
The kind voice, the beloved smile of Granny received him before
the cottage door.
“Welcome, darlin’, and where was my darlin’, and what kept him
from his old Granny?”
So they hugged and kissed, and then he related all that had
happened, and asked “was it any harm, Granny?”
“Not a bit, darlin’, that’s a good lady, and a grand lady, and a fit
companion for ye, and see how she knew the gentle blood in your
pretty face; and ye may go, as she has asked you, to-morrow
evening again, and as often as she asks ye; for it was only the little
fellows that’s going about without edication or manners, that your
friends, and who can blame them, doesn’t like ye to keep company
with—and who’d blame them, seeing they’re seldom out of mischief,
and that’s the beginning o’ wickedness, and you’re going, but oh!
darlin’, not for three long years, thank God, to a grand school where
there’s none but the best.”
So this chance acquaintance grew, and the lady seemed to take
every week a deeper interest in the fine little boy, so sensitive,
generous, and intelligent, and he very often drank tea with his new
friends.
CHAPTER LIX.
AN OLD FRIEND.
I am going now to describe the occurrences of a particular evening

on which my young friend drank tea at Stanlake Farm, which was the
name of the house with the old garden to which I have introduced
the reader.
A light shower had driven the party in from the garden, and so the
boy and Amy were at their ninepins in the great hall, when, the door
being open, a gentleman rode up and dismounted, placing the bridle
in the hand of a groom who accompanied him.
A tall man he was, with whiskers and hair dashed with white, and
a slight stoop. He strode into the hall, his hat on, and a whip still in
his hand.
“Hollo! So there you are—and how is your ladyship?” said he.
“Skittles, by the law! Brayvo! Two down, by Jove! I’d rather that
young man took you in hand than I. And tell me—where’s Ally?”
“Mamma’s in the drawing-room,” said the young lady, scarcely
regarding his presence. “Now play, it’s your turn,” she said,
addressing her companion.
The new arrival looked at the boy and paused till he threw the ball.
“That’s devilish good too,” said the stranger—“very near the nine.
Eh? But a miss is as good as a mile; and I don’t think he’s quite as
good as you—and she’s in the drawing-room; which is the drawing-
room?”
“Don’t you know the drawing-room! Well, there it is,” and the
young lady indicated it with her finger. “My turn now.”
And while the game was pursued in the hall, the visitor pushed
open the drawing-room door and entered.
“And how is Miss Ally?”
“Oh, Harry! Really!”
“Myself as large as life. You don’t look half pleased, Ally. But I
have nout but good news for you to-day. You’re something richer this
week than you were last.”
“What is it, Harry? Tell me what you mean?”
“So I will. You know that charge on Carwell—a hundred and forty
pounds a year—well, that’s dropped in. That old witch is dead—ye
might ’a seen it in the newspaper, if you take in one—Bertha
Velderkaust. No love lost between ye. Eh?”
“Oh, Harry! Harry! don’t,” said poor Alice, pale, and looking
intensely pained.
“Well, I won’t then; I didn’t think ’twould vex you. Only you know
what a head devil that was—and she’s dead in the old place,
Hoxton. I read the inquest in the Times. She was always drinkin’. I
think she was a bit mad. She and the people in the back room were
always quarrelling; and the father’s up for that and forgery. But
’twasn’t clear how it came about. Some swore she was out of her
mind with drink, and pitched herself out o’ the window; and some
thought it might ’a bin that chap as went in to rob her, thinkin’ she
was stupid; and so there was a tussle for’t—she was main strong, ye
know—and he chucked her out. Anyhow she got it awful, for she fell
across the spikes of the area-rails, and she hung on them with three
lodged in her side—the mad dog-fox, she was!”
“Oh, Harry! How shocking! Oh! pray don’t!” exclaimed Alice, who
looked as if she was going to faint.
“Well, she lay there, without breath enough to screech, twistin’ like
a worm—for three hours, it’s thought.”
“Oh! Harry—pray don’t describe it; don’t, I implore. I feel so ill.”
“Well, I won’t, if you say so, only she’s smashed, and cold in her
wooden surtout; and her charge is reverted to you, now; and I
thought I’d tell ye.”
“Thank you, Harry,” she said, very faintly.
“And when did you come here? I only heard this morning,” asked
Harry.
“Five weeks ago.”
“Do you like it; ain’t it plaguy lonesome?”
“I like the quiet—at least for a time,” she answered.
“And I’m thinkin’ o’ gettin’ married—upon my soul I am. What do
you think o’ that?”
“Really!”
“Sure as you’re there, but it won’t be none o’ your love-matches.
‘Bring something, lass, along wi’ thee,
If thou intend to live wi’ me.’
That’s my motto. Sweetheart and honey-bird keeps no house, I’ve
heard say. I like a body that can look after things, and that would
rather fund fifty pounds than spend a hundred.
‘A nice wife and a back door
Hath made many a rich man poor,’
as they say; and besides, I’m not a young fellow no longer. I’m
pushin’ sixty, and I should be wise. And who’s the little chap that’s
playin’ skittles wi’ Amy in the hall?”
“Oh, that’s such a nice little boy. His father’s name is Henry, and
his mother has been dead a long time. He lives with a good old
woman named Marjory Trevellian. What’s the matter, Harry?”
“Nothing. I beg your pardon. I was thinkin’ o’ something else, and I
didn’t hear. Tell me now, and I’ll listen.”
So she repeated her information, and Harry yawned and stretched
his arms.
“‘For want o’ company,
Welcome trumpery,’
and I must be goin’ now. I wouldn’t mind drinkin’ a glass o’ sherry, as
you’re so pressing, for I’ve had a stiff ride, and dust’s drouthy.”
So Harry, having completed his visit characteristically, took his
leave, and mounted his nag and rode away.
CHAPTER LX.
TOM ORANGE.
Little Miss Amy had a slight cold, and the next tea-party was put off
for a day. On the evening following Harry’s visit at Stanlake Farm,
Marjory Trevellian being at that time absent in the village to make
some frugal purchases, who should suddenly appear before the little
boy’s eyes, as he lifted them from his fleet upon the pond, but his
friend, Tom Orange, as usual in high and delightful spirits.
Need I say how welcome Tom was? He asked in a minute or two
for Marjory, and took her temporary absence with great good
humour. Tom affected chilliness, and indeed the evening was a little
sharp, and proposed that they should retire to the cottage, and sit
down there.
“How soon do you suppose, youngster, the old hen will come
home?”
“Who?”
“Marjory Daw, down the chimney.”
“Oh, Granny?”
This nickname was the only pleasantry of Mr. Orange which did
not quite please the boy.
Tom Orange here interpolated his performance of the jackdaw,
with his eyelids turned inside out and the pupils quivering, which,
although it may possibly have resembled the jackdaw of heraldry,
was not an exact portraiture of the bird familiar to us in natural
history; and when this was over he asked again—“How soon will she
be home?”
“She walked down to the town, and I think she can’t be more than
about half-way back again.”
“That’s a mile, and three miles an hour is the best of her paces if
she was runnin’ for a pound o’ sausages and a new cap. Heigh ho!
and alas and alack-a-day. No one at home but the maid, and the
maid’s gone to church! I wrote her a letter the day before yesterday,
and I must read it again before she comes back. Where does she
keep her letters?”
“In her work-box on the shelf.”
“This will be it, the wery identical fiddle!” said Tom Orange,
playfully, setting it down upon the little deal table, and, opening it, he
took out the little sheaf of letters from the end, and took them one by
one to the window, where he took the liberty of reading them.
I think he was disappointed, for he pitched them back again into
their nook in the little trunk-shaped box contemptuously.
The boy regarded Tom Orange as a friend of the family so
confidential, and as a man in all respects so admirable and virtuous,
that nothing appeared more desirable and natural than that excellent
person’s giving his attention to the domestic correspondence.
He popped the box back again in its berth. Then he treated the
young gentleman to Lingo’s song with the rag-tag-merry-derry
perrywig and hat-band, &c., and at the conclusion of the
performance admitted that he was “dry,” and with a pleasant wink,
and the tip of his finger pushing the end of his nose a good deal to
the left, he asked him whether he could tell him where Mrs.
Trevellian, who would be deeply grieved if she thought that Tom was
detained for a drink till her return, kept her liquor.
“Yes, I can show you,” said the boy.
“Wait a minute, my guide, my comforter, and friend,” said Tom
Orange; and he ascertained from the door-stone that no one was
inconveniently near.
The boy was getting a tea-cup off the shelf.
“Never mind sugar, my hero, I’ll sweeten it with a thought of
Marjory Daw.”
The boy explained, and led him into the dark nook by the hall door.
Tom Orange, well pleased, moved almost on tiptoe, and looked
curiously and spoke under his breath, as he groped in this twilight.
“Here it is,” said the boy, frankly.
“Where?”
“Here.”
“This!” said Tom, for his friend had uncovered a crock of water.
Tom Orange glared at him and at the water with grotesque
surprise, and the bona fides of the boy and the simplicity of the
situation struck Tom comically, and, exploding good-humouredly, he
sat down in Marjory’s chair and laughed hilariously.
Having satisfied himself by a confidential dialogue that Marjory
Daw had no private bottle of comfort anywhere, this agreeable fellow
so far forgot his thirst, that he did not mind drawing water from the
crock, and talked on a variety of subjects to the young gentleman. In
the course of this conversation he asked him two topographical
questions. One was—
“Did you ever hear of a place called Carwell Grange?”
And the other resembled it.
“Did you ever hear of a place called Wyvern?”
“No.”
“Think, lad. Did you never hear Mrs. Trevellian speak of Wyvern?
Or of Carwell Grange?”
“No.”
“Because there is the tallest mushroom you ever saw in your life
growing there, and it is grown to that degree that it blocks the door
so that the Squire can’t get into his own house, and the mushroom is
counted one of the wonders of the world upon my little word of
honour as a gentleman! And
‘Since there’s neither drink nor victuals,
Suppose, my lord, we play at skittles?’
And if she’s not back by the end of the game, tell her I had to go on
to the bridge to see lame Bill Withershins, and I’ll be back again this
evening, I think, or in the morning at latest.”
The game was played, but Marjory did not appear, and Tom
Orange, entertaining his young friend with a ludicrous imitation of Bill
Withershins’ knock-knees, took his departure, leaving his delighted
companion in the state which Moore describes as being usual—
“When the lamp that lighted
The traveller at first goes out.”
So, having watched Tom till he was quite out of sight, he returned
to his neglected navy on the pond, and delivered his admirable
Crichton’s message to Marjory Daw on her return.
CHAPTER LXI.
THE HOUR AND THE MAN.
Supper-time came, and Tom Orange did not return. Darkness

closed over the old cottage, the poplar trees and the town, and the
little boy said his prayers under the superintendence of worthy
Marjory, and went to his bed.
He was disturbed in his sleep by voices talking in the room. He
could only keep his eyes open for a little time, and he saw Tom
Orange talking with mammy. He was at one side of the little table
and she at another, and his head was leaning forward so as to
approach uncomfortably near to the mutton-fat with a long snuff in
the middle. Mammy, as he indiscriminately called “Granny,” was
sobbing bitterly into her apron, and sometimes with streaming eyes,
speaking so low that he could not hear, to Tom Orange.
Interesting as was the scene, slumber stole him away, and when
he next wakened, Tom was gone, and mammy was sitting on the
bed, crying as if her heart would break. When he opened his eyes,
she said—
“Oh, darlin’! darlin’! My man—my own, own blessed man—my
darlin’!” and she hugged him to her heart.
He remembered transports similar when two years ago he was
very ill of a fever.
“I’m not sick, mammy, indeed; I’m quite well,” and with these
assurances and many caresses, he again fell asleep.
In the morning his Sunday clothes, to his wonder, were prepared
for him to put on. The little old faded crimson carpet-bag, which she
had always told him, to the no small content of his self-importance,
was his own, stood plump and locked on the little table under the
clock. His chair was close beside mammy’s. She had all the
delicacies he liked best for his breakfast. There was a thin little slice
of fried bacon, and a new-laid egg, and a hot cake, and tea—quite a
grand breakfast.
Mammy sat beside him very close. Her arm was round him. She
was very pale. She tried to smile at his prattle, and her eyes filled up
as often as she looked at him, or heard him speak.
Now and then he looked wonderingly in her face, and she tried to
smile her old smile and nodded, and swallowed down some tea from
her cup.
She made belief of eating her breakfast, but she could not.
When the wondering little man had ended his breakfast, with her
old kind hands she drew him towards her.
“Sit down on my lap, my precious—my own man—my beautiful
boy—my own angel bright. Oh, darlin’—darlin’—darlin’!” and she
hugged the boy to her heart, and sobbed over his shoulder as if her
heart was bursting.
He remembered that she cried the same way when the doctor said
he was safe and sure to recover.
“Mammy,” he said, kissing her, “Amy has birthdays—and I think
this is my birthday—is it?”
“No, darlin’; no, no,” she sobbed, kissing him. “No, my darlin’, no.
Oh, no, ’taint that.”
She got up hastily, and brought him his little boots that she had
cleaned. The boy put them on, wondering, and she laced them.
With eyes streaming she took up one of the little cork boats, which
he kept on the window-stool floating in a wooden bowl.
“You’ll give me one of them, darlin’—to old mammy—for a
keepsake.”
“Oh! yes. Choose a good one—the one with the gold paper on the
pin; that one sails the best of all.”
“And—and”—she cried bitterly before she could go on—“and this
is the little box I’ll put them in,” and she picked them out of the bowl
and laid them in a cardboard box, which she quickly tied round. “And
this is the last day of poor mammy with her bright only darlin’—for
your friends are sending for you to-day, and Mr. Archdale will be here
in ten minutes, and you’re to go with him. Oh, my precious—the light
o’ the house—and to leave me alone.”
The boy stood up, and with a cry, ran and threw his arms round
her, where she stood near the clock.
“Oh! no, no, no. Oh! mammy, you wouldn’t; you couldn’t, you
couldn’t.”
“Oh, darlin’, you’re breaking my heart. What can I do?”
“Don’t let me go. Oh, mammy, don’t. Oh, you couldn’t, you
couldn’t.”
“But what can I do, darlin’? Oh, darlin’, what can I do?”
“I’ll run away, mammy, I’ll run away; and I’ll come back when
they’re gone, and stay with you.”
“Oh, God Almighty!” she cried, “here he’s coming. I see him
coming down the hazel road.”
“Hide me, mammy; hide me in the press. Oh, mammy, mammy,
you wouldn’t give me to him!”
The boy had got into this large old-painted press, and coiled
himself up between two shelves. There was hardly a moment to
think; and yielding to the instinct of her desperate affection, and to
the child’s wild appeal, she locked the door, and put the key in her
pocket.
She sat down. She was half stunned by her own audacity. She
scarcely knew what she had done. Before she could recover herself,
the door darkened, a hand crossed the hatch and opened it, and ex-
Sergeant-Major Archdale entered the cottage.
In curt military fashion he announced himself, and demanded the
boy.
She was looking straight in this formidable man’s face, and yet it
seemed as if he were vanishing from before her eyes.
“Where’s the boy?” inquired the chill stern voice of the Sergeant.
It seemed to her like lifting a mountain this effort to speak. She felt
as if she were freezing as she uttered the denial.
“He aint here.”
“Where is he?” demanded the Sergeant’s imperturbably clear cold
voice.
“He’s run away,” she said with an effort, and the Sergeant seemed
to vanish quite away, and she thought she was on the point of
fainting.
The Sergeant glanced at the breakfast table, and saw that two had
taken tea together; he saw the carpet-bag packed.
“H’m?” intimated Archdale, with closed lips. He looked round the
cottage room, and the Sergeant sat down wonderfully composed,
considering the disconcerting nature of the announcement.
The ex-Sergeant-Major had in his time commanded parties in
search of deserters, and he was not a bad slaught-hound of that
sort.
“He breakfasted with you?” said he, with a cool nod toward the
table.
There was a momentary hesitation, and she cleared her voice and
said—
“Yes.”
Archdale rose and placed his fingers on the teapot.
“That’s hot,” said the Sergeant with the same inflexible dignity.
Marjory was awfully uneasy.
“He can’t be far. Which way did he go?”
“Out by the door. I can’t tell.”
The ex-Sergeant-Major might have believed her the goddess of
truth itself, or might have thought her the most impudent liar in
England. You could not have gathered in the least from his
countenance toward which view his conclusions tended.
The Sergeant’s light cold grey eye glided again round the room,
and there was another silence awfully trying to our good friend
Marjory.
CHAPTER LXII.
THE MARCH TO NOULTON FARM.
“I think, ma’am, the boy’s in the house. You’d best give him up, for
I’ll not go without him. How many rooms have you?”
“Three and a loft, sir.”
The Sergeant stood up.
“I’ll search the house first, ma’am, and if he’s not here I’ll inform
the police and have him in the Hue-and-Cry; and if you have had
anything to do with the boy’s deserting, or had a hand in making
away with him anyhow, I’ll have you in gaol and punished. I must
secure the door, and you can leave the house first, if you like best.”
“Very well, sir,” answered she.
But at this moment came a knocking and crying from within the
press.
“Oh! no—’twasn’t mammy; ’twas I that did it. Don’t take mammy.”
“You see, ma’am, you give useless trouble. Please open that door
—I shall have to force it, otherwise,” he added, as very pale and
trembling she hesitated.
Standing as he might before his commanding officer, stiff, with his
heels together, with his inflexibly serene face, full before her, he
extended his hand, and said simply, “The key, ma’am.”
In all human natures—the wildest and most stubborn—there is a
point at which submission follows command, and there was that in
the serenity of the ex-Sergeant-Major which went direct to the
instinct of obedience.
It was quite idle any longer trying to conceal the boy. With a
dreadful ache at her heart she put her hand in her pocket and
handed him the key.
As the door opened the little boy shrank to the very back of the
recess, from whence he saw the stout form of the Sergeant stooped
low, as his blue, smooth fixed countenance peered narrowly into the
dark. After a few seconds he seemed to discern the figure of the boy.
“Come, you sir, get out,” said the commanding voice of the visitor,
as the cane which he carried in his hand, paid round with wax-end
for some three inches at the extremity, began switching his little legs
smartly.
“Oh, sir, for the love of God!” cried Marjory, clinging to his hand.
“Oh, sir, he’s the gentlest little creature, and he’ll do whatever he’s
bid, and the lovingest child in the world.”
The boy had got out by this time, and looking wonderingly in the
man’s face, was unconsciously, with the wincing of pain, lifting his
leg slightly, for the sting of the cane was quite new to him.
“If I catch you at that work again I’ll give you five dozen,” said his
new acquaintance.
“Is this his?” said he, touching the carpet-bag with his cane.
“Yes, sir, please.”
He took it in his hand, and glanced at the boy—I think it was in his
mind to make him carry it. But the child was slender, and the bag,
conscientiously packed with everything that had ever belonged to
him, was a trifle too heavy.
“Anything else?” demanded the Sergeant-Major.
“This—this, God bless him.”
It was the little box with his ships.
“And this;” and she thrust the griddle cake, broken across and
rolled up in brown paper, into the boy’s pocket.
“And these;” and three apples she had ready, she thrust after
them.
“And ho! my blessed darlin’, my darlin’, darlin’, darlin’.”
He was lifted up against her heart, folded fast, and hugging her
round the neck, they kissed and cried and cried and kissed, and at
last she let him down; and the Sergeant-Major, with the cane under
his arm, the carpet-bag in one hand, and the boy’s wrist firmly held in
the other, marched out of the door.
“That’s enough—don’t follow, woman,” said he, after they had
gone about twenty yards on the path; “and I’ll report you,” he added
with a nod which, with these pleasant words, she might take as a
farewell or not as she pleased.
She stood on the little rising ground by the hawthorn-tree, kissing
her hands wildly after him, with streaming eyes.
“I’ll be sure to see you soon. I’d walk round the world barefoot to
see my pretty man again,” she kept crying after him; “and I’ll bring
the ninepins, I’ll be sure. Mammy’s comin’, my darlin’.”
And the receding figure of the little boy was turned toward her all it
could. He was gazing over his shoulder, with cheeks streaming with
tears, and his little hand waving yearningly back to her until he was
out of sight. And after a while she turned back, and there was their
ninepins’ ground, and the tarn, and her sobs quickened almost to a
scream; and she sat down on the stone bench under the window—
for she could not bear to enter the dark cottage—and there, in Irish
phrase, she cried her fill.
In the meantime Archdale and his companion, or prisoner—which
you will—pursued their march. He still held the boy’s wrist, and the
boy cried and sobbed gently to himself all the way.
When they came down to the little hamlet called Maple Wickets he
hired a boy to carry the carpet-bag to Wunning, four miles further on,
where the Warhampton ’bus passes, as everybody knows, at half-
past twelve o’clock daily.
They resumed their march. The Sergeant was a serenely taciturn
man. He no more thought of addressing the boy than he did of
apostrophising the cane or the carpet-bag. He let him sob on, and
neither snubbed nor consoled him, but carried his head serene and
high, looking straight before him.
At length the novelty of the scene began to act upon the volatility
of childhood.
As he walked by the Sergeant he began to prattle, at first timidly,
and then more volubly.
The first instinct of the child is trust. It was a kind of consolation to
the boy to talk a great deal of his home, and Tom Orange was of
course mentioned with the usual inquiry, “Do you know Tom
Orange?”
“Why so?”
Then followed the list of that facetious and brilliant person’s
accomplishments.
“And are we to go near a place called Wyvern or Carwell Grange?”
asked the boy, whose memory, where his fancy was interested, was
retentive.
“Why so?” again demanded the Sergeant, looking straight before
him.
“Because Tom Orange told me there’s the biggest mushroom in
the world grown up there, and that the owner of the house can’t get
in, for it fills up the door.”
“Tom Orange told you that?” demanded the Sergeant in the same
way.
And the boy, supposing it incredulity on his part, assured him that
Tom, who was truth itself, had told him so only yesterday.
The Sergeant said no more, and you could not have told in the
least by his face that he had made a note of it and was going to
“report” Tom Orange in the proper quarter. And in passing, I may
mention that about three weeks later Tom Orange was peremptorily
dismissed from his desultory employments under Mr. Archdale, and
was sued for stealing apples from Warhampton orchard, and some
minor peccadillos, and brought before the magistrates, among whom
sat, as it so happened, on that occasion, Squire Fairfield of Wyvern,
who was “precious hard on him,” and got him in for more than a
month with hard labour. The urchin hireling with the carpet-bag
trudged on in front as the Sergeant-Major had commanded.
Our little friend, with many a sobbing sigh, and a great load at his
heart, yet was looking about him.
They were crossing a moor with beautiful purple heather, such as
he had never seen before. The Sergeant had let go his wrist. He felt
more at his ease every way.
There were little pools of water here and there which attracted the
boy’s attention, and made him open his box of cork boats and peep
at them. He wondered how they would sail in these dark little nooks,
and at last, one lying very conveniently, he paused at its margin, and
took out a ship and floated it, and another, and another. How quickly
seconds fly and minutes.
He was roused by the distant voice of the Sergeant-Major
shouting, “Hollo, you sir, come here.”
He looked up. The Sergeant was consulting his big silver watch as
he stood upon a little eminence of peat.
By the time he reached him the Sergeant had replaced it, and the
two or three seals and watchkey he sported were dangling at the end
of his chain upon his paunch. The Sergeant was standing with his
heels together and the point of his cane close to the side of his boot.
“Come to the front,” said the Sergeant.
“Give up that box,” said he.
The boy placed it in his hand. He uncovered it, turned over the
little navy with his fingers, and then jerked the box and its contents
over the heath at his side.
“Don’t pick one of ’em up,” said he.
“Move half a pace to the right,” was his next order.
His next command was—
“Hold out your hand.”
The boy looked in his face, surprised.
The Sergeant’s face looked not a bit angrier or a bit kinder than
usual. Perfectly serene.
“Hold out your hand, sir.”
He held it out, and the cane descended with a whistling cut across
his fingers. Another. The boy’s face flushed with pain, and his
deadened hand sunk downward. An upward blow of the cane across
his knuckles accompanied the command, “Hold it up, sir,” and a third
cut came down.
The Sergeant was strong, and could use his wrist dexterously.
“Hold out the other;” and the same discipline was repeated.
Mingled with and above the pain which called up the three great
black weals across the slender fingers of each hand, was the sense
of outrage and cruelty.
The tears sprang to his eyes, and for the first time in his life he
cried passionately under that double anguish.
“Walk in front,” said the Sergeant, serenely.
And squeezing and wringing his trembling hands together, the still
writhing little fellow marched along the path, with a bitterer sense of
desolation than ever.
The ’bus was late at Wunning; and a lady in it, struck by the
beauty and sadness of the little boy’s face, said some kind words,
and seemed to take to him, he thought, with a tenderness that made
his heart fuller; and it was a labour almost too great for him to keep
down the rising sobs and the tears that were every moment on the
point of flowing over. This good Samaritan bought a bag of what
were called “Ginger-bread nuts”—quite a little store; which Archdale
declined leaving at the boy’s discretion. But I am bound to say that
they were served out to him, from day to day, with conscientious
punctuality by the Sergeant-Major, who was strictly to be depended
on in all matters of property; and would not have nibbled at one of
those nuts though his thin lips had watered and not a soul had been
near. He must have possessed a good many valuable military
virtues, or he could not, I presume, have been where he was.
Noulton Farm is a melancholy but not an ugly place. There are a
great many trees about it. They stand too near the windows. The
house is small and old, and there is a small garden with a thick high
hedge round it.
The members of the family were few. Miss Mary Archdale was ill
when they arrived. She was the only child of the ex-Sergeant, who
was a widower; and the new inmate of the house heard of her with a
terror founded on his awe of her silent father.
They entered a small parlour, and the boy sat down in the chair
indicated by the Sergeant. That person hung his hat on a peg in the
hall, and placed his cane along the chimney-piece. Then he rang the
bell.
The elderly woman who was the female staff of the kitchen
entered. She looked frightened, as all that household did, in their
master’s presence, and watched him with an alarmed eye.
“Where’s Miss Mary?”
“A-spitting blood, sir, please.”
“Bring in supper,” said the Sergeant.
The boy sat in fear at the very corner of the table. His grief would
not let him eat, and he sipped a cup of tea that was too hot, and had
neither milk nor sugar enough. The Sergeant snuffed his candle, and
put on a pair of plated spectacles, and looked through his weekly
paper.
While he was so employed there glided into the room a very slight
girl, with large eyes and a very pale face. Her hair was brown and
rich.
The hand with which she held her shawl across was very thin; and
in her pale face and large eyes was a timid and imploring look that

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Curriculum Making, Reciprocal

Learning, and the Best-Loved Self

Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-Institutional Collaboration

Science Education and International Cross-Cultural

Learning From the Best: Lessons Award-Winning

Reciprocal Learning for Cross-Cultural Mathematics

Self-Studying In The Digital Age: How To Take Advantage

The Early Childhood Curriculum: Inquiry Learning

Solutions Manual to Introduction to Robotics Mechanics

Learning Japanese Hiragana and Katakana: A Workbook for

More information about this series at

Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education

Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

Curriculum making, reciprocal learning and the best-loved self invites us

Metaphors matter too. Here, metaphors offer sparkling windows onto

Lynn Paine, Ph.D.

4 The Best-Loved Self 117

Fig. 1.1 Commonplaces of curriculum 7

Abstract Three narrative threads—curriculum making, reciprocal

Keywords Curriculum making · Teacher-as-curriculum-maker ·

© The Author(s) 2020 1

and as “weightless as dreams” (Stone, 1988, p. 244) became perceptible

The Curriculum-Teaching Puzzle

The Primacy of Teachers

curriculum commonplaces and the notion of curriculum as a lived experi-

Fig. 1.1 Commonplaces of curriculum

spotlight on what each commonplace takes into account before pressing

(1961/1978, p. 242) words. “Likely stories” (Schwab, 1976, pp. 14–15)

Being a narrative inquirer, I would like to slip in my own reading

p. 2444). In short, teachers with “larger experience and riper wisdom”

as “hand-servants” (Hansen, 2011) whose continuing employment rests

p. 245) where teachers and students can negotiate curriculum unhin-

brought to bear in some archetypal classroom, as proponents of standards

Thus, in the teacher-as-curriculum-maker image, attention necessarily

Curriculum Making in Action

Daryl Wilson (1997–2017)

Charles: There is this mirroring thing here that is not collaborative. It

Because the models of teaching were expected to be implemented

how to teach connecting,

Flipping back to remembered pages

As foreshadowed, questions continued to “stir in the air” for the Yaeger

Calkins’ and Keene’s books and moved toward resolution of what up to

The teachers’ ah-hah movement presaged the literacy teachers’ own

And then we laugh,

However, despite the teachers’ powerful poetry writing, a major problem

Laura went on to say:

principal with one year of experience remained. Unfortunately, a begin-

sets in classroom libraries, stacked behind pillows or curtains, or stored in

This is what we have come to…

Knowing there was “nowhere to go from here” (Craig, 2020, p. 10),

Bernadette Lohle (1998–2011)

There is something about the word, dissemination—like the word,

While it was a grant program expectation that Bernadette would func-

personally considered herself a curriculum maker modeling a story of how

Bernadette: It (the arts/arts-based learning philosophy) was slowly chipped

Bernadette: Exactly. And then a kind of power struggle ensued—the

As a curriculum maker, Bernadette focused her attention on her

However, the mother of all Black swan events5 —September 11,

In a special ceremony, New York City’s then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani

• it was a happening…and a great deal more was happening than what

Bernadette also reflected on the lesson plans she was supposed to

Infuriated by the “pressure-cooker…situation,” Bernadette did not hold

Here, Bernadette echoed Milli (2014) who likewise spoke of “…[people]