Creating Curriculum: Teachers and Students as a Community of Learners

In practice curriculum has historically been a hierarchy of skills and sequence models imposed on teachers and students. This has been frustrating for teachers, because it directed them to spend time covering specific topics rather than addressing the more meaningful and overall point of education: learning. Moreover, it has left the teacher with few decisions about what should happen in the classroom and it has entirely omitted the students.

This book is a true primer--a work to be read in preparation for further discussion of curriculum. The aim is to help teachers define some terms and consider the purposes of a curriculum so that the goal of effective learning is not lost.

Kathy Gnagey Short teaches courses in children’s literature and curriculum at the University of Arizona. She continues to work with teacher study groups on a wide range of topics, including literature circles and curriculum as inquiry. She is coauthor of Creating Classrooms for Authors and Inquirers, Second Edition (Heinemann, 1996), with Jerome Harste and Carolyn Burke, and coauthored Learning Together Through Inquiry with several contributors to this book.

Carolyn Burke has the rare ability to take what is currently known and apply it to classroom instruction. A former first-grade teacher, Burke currently is Professor of Language Education at Indiana University and spends the bulk of her time teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in reading and writing education. She is well known for her work in miscue analysis and reading.

Jerome C. Harste is a well known author of children’s books, such as It Didn’t Frighten Me and My Icky Picky Sister (Willowisp Press). Harstes’s research has focused on what young children know prior to coming to school. Together with Carolyn Burke and Virginia Woodward, their book Language Stories & Literacy Lessons (Heinemann) received the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English by the National Council of Teachers of English in 1987.