“Applebee's central point, the need to teach 'knowledge in context,' is absolutely crucial for the hopes of any reformed curriculum. His experience and knowledge give his voice an authority that makes many of the current proposals on both the left and right seem shallow by comparison.”—Gerald Graff, University of Chicago From the Great Books to the rise multiculturalism discussions of curriculum in American schools and colleges usually focus on what educators consider most worth knowing. In Curriculum As Conversation, Arthur N. Applebee argues that this approach it the curriculum debate reflects a fundamental misconception about the nature of knowledge and learning. Arthur N. Applebee is professor in the School of Education and director of the National Research Center on Literature Teaching and Learning at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Curriculum as Conversation Transforming Traditions of Teaching and Learning By Arthur N. Applebee The University of Chicago Press Copyright © 1996 The University of Chicago All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-226-02123-2 Contents Acknowledgments, ONE. Introduction: The Role of Tradition, TWO. The Individual and Tradition, THREE. Deadly Traditions, FOUR. Curriculum as Conversation, FIVE. Characteristics of Effective Curricula, SIX. Structuring Curricular Conversations, SEVEN. Recent Curriculum Proposals as Domains for Conversation, EIGHT. Toward a Pedagogy of Knowledge-in-Action, NINE. Reconciling Conflicting Traditions, Notes, References, Index, CHAPTER 1 Introduction: The Role of Tradition I begin with tradition: what we mean by it, how it shapes our individual and cultural lives, and, most of all, its relationships to what and how we teach. I will argue that the power of education is intimately bound up in the social and cultural traditions within which education is set. These traditions enable and transform the minds of individuals raised within them, and are in turn themselves transformed by those same individuals. Traditions change as the circumstances that surround them change; in that way they preserve their power to guide the present and the future as well as to reflect the past. The rhetoric of educational reform, however, has distorted the nature of tradition and its relationship to education. Tradition has been construed as antiprogressive, out of date. It is attacked for preserving the status quo, resisting reform, obstructing social justice. Reinforcing these connotations, conservative educationists have turned to tradition as a source of common values, social stability, and intellectual attainment (see Adler, Van Doren, Bennett, and Bloom). Matthew Arnold's title Culture and Anarchy (1867) starkly encapsulated the choice as he saw it, and his rhetoric continues to echo through our contemporary debates. But that characterization of education and tradition is simplistic. In particular, in this book I will argue that traditions are the knowledge-in-action out of which we construct our realities as we know and perceive them, and that to honor such traditions we must reconstrue our curriculum to focus on knowledge-in-action rather than knowledge-out-of-context. Traditions in this sense provide culturally constituted tools for understanding and reforming the world, tools of which we, Janus-like, are both heir and progenitor. As we move through life, we learn to draw upon many different traditions that provide alternative, often complementary, ways of knowing and doing—of defining the world and of existing within it. I write these words sitting at a window at the Villa Serbelloni, in the Lake District of northern Italy, surrounded by traditions. The villa walls are three feet thick, built out of layers of plaster and rubble using techniques that go back thousands of years. My study is in a building that has been a church, a monastery, a private home. It still houses a chapel. Out my window are olive trees and grape arbors, cultivated and harvested using techniques that may be older still. We drink the wine at dinner. I write in English but am surrounded by Italian, two modern languages with prehistoric roots in Indo-European. My writing is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, a modern incarnation of an ancient tradition of philanthropy and patronage. I write on a laptop computer, the latest advance in the equally ancient tradition of scribes and scholars. The traditions that surround me, then, are both ancient and living. The cultural knowledge that they represent—the tools for making sense of and living in the world—draw from the past but speak to the present and the future: the wine must age; my words will pass from my computer screen to a printed page, and perhaps to a database in an electronic library. So it is with all of the traditions that surround us—those of architecture, agriculture, engineering, the arts, religion, history, science, mathematics, literature. They are traditions of kn