It’s that time of year again. Another year 11 cohort have disappeared into the ether of study leave and some tasty gained time can be put to good use. With this new breathing space some of the larger questions around our curriculum planning (why we do what we do and and how we can improve the learning experience for our students) can be tackled.
The purpose of an English curriculum in an international setting is a question that we’ve been chewing on as a team for some time and, while it’s been alluded to in previous blog posts, the purpose of this blog (and the site) is really about getting to grips with an English curriculum that attempts to find balance between challenge, values and 21st century applications.
Much has been written on the purpose of existing curricula in preparing students for the future. How it can be too focused on exam results rather than broader ideas of wellbeing, problem solving and creativity (that one keeps popping up - link to previous blog post).
Defining the curriculum and intent is the first hurdle and where things can get garbled in some British international schools. Are we aping the National Curriculum? If so, why? Are we taking the best of it and adapting the rest? Are these adaptations logical and based on research or evidence? Is it grounded in ensuring students learn the same things (knowledge) and have access to the same experiences of learning? If scaffolding is required, does it allow access to challenge? Is equity taken seriously? You’d hope so.
For our team, it’s increasingly centred on thinking about the ‘curriculum’ as a system. We’ve made more deliberate links between English and Media disciplines - partly based on our experiences of students’ use of technology and media literacy. Examples include interleaving a non-fiction unit on media coverage of the Global Refugee Crisis (exploring elements of bias and first-hand experiences) with our studies of The Crossing. To demonstrate their learning, students created homepages of online news sources and then presented these in a showcase, utilising design conventions they had studied throughout the unit. An exercise in incorporating modern text construction and presentation opportunities - the latter being an area for development within our context in Malaysia.
As the showcase ran - and students were visibly enthused about sharing the products they had created, perceptive questions were being asked, and every single one of them was able to highlight an element of their work they were proud of, I wondered why we hadn’t planned a learning sequence like this earlier.
We’re fortunate to be in an environment where access to technology is sometimes taken for granted, and the ongoing struggle to curb screen time resonated, for me, while working through a Media Ecology unit with a Year 13 Media Studies class. If English is a subject with a central purpose of enhancing communication, harnessing student expertise and enthusiasm for technology - and developing their skills with it - might just lead to higher quality interactions.
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