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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.
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
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Imogen
Foreword
vii
viii FOREWORD
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.
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
Afterword 157
Index 163
xi
List of Figures
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Curriculum Making 1
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
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
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.
1 CURRICULUM MAKING 1 7
Teacher
Curriculum
Milieu Learner
Making
Subject
Matter
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
1 CURRICULUM MAKING 1 9
Language: Finnish
Toim.
Elias Lönnrot
MEHILÄINEN W. 1836.
Tammikuulta.
Wiipurin Linna.
Koheteli purje'puita,
Waate'varpoja varasi,
Nosti puihin purjehia,
Waattehia varpapuihin; 40
Niin on puissa purjehia,
Waattehia varpapuissa,
Kuni kummun kuusiloita,
Tahi mäntyjä mäellä.
Läksi siitä laskemahan; 45
Laski päivän maavesiä,
Toisen päivän suovesiä,
Kolmannen merivesiä.
Katselevi, kuuntelevi;
Niin kuuli kevä'käkkösen
Laulelevan laksomailla,
Kuni muinenki kotona,
Elomailla entisillä.
Wieläki kemä'käköset
Laulelevat laksomailla,
Yhet laksot, yhet laulut,
Yhet armahat asunnot,
Ei ole yhet asujat,
Yhet korvat kuulemassa —
Jo on kauanki Kaleva
Ollut poissa poikinensa.
***