Sep 21 Reading

  The Educational Imagination by Elliot W. Eisner made several interesting points about curriculum design. The first that stood out to me was around the use of extrinsic rewards. It makes sense to me that extrinsic rewards help with student compliance, but making them “reward junkies” could be ultimately unhelpful for them. Most students will end up working jobs which are often mundane, and having an extrinsic reward dependence would be a hinderance. The author does note, however, that part of the “implicit” curriculum is to train students to do mundane and boring tasks. This may serve some of these students which will have a career of this sort. My take on it, is that perhaps they’ll learn that the act of doing something at all has intrinsic value, no matter how mundane or boring. The fact that your activity is outputting something tangible into the world has value on its own.

I like that the author pointed out some of the positive aspects of the implicit curriculum: cognitive flexibility, punctuality, and deferred gratification are extremely useful tools which can help a person succeed in many areas of life. Finally, I was interested in the point made on page 99: That intellectual processes used in school cover only a small portion of the kinds of intellectual processes of which a human being is capable. This is a framework where I’d like to expand my ideas around lesson planning and curriculum for mathematics education.