Product reviews for Reclaiming the Curriculum

This generally inspirational collection of accounts in which educational practitioners have demonstrated the possibility for thinking outside the curriculum box should act as a starting point for those wishing to forge a new direction in their own practice. The relentless deluge of targets, standards in education and snap inspections could easily prove enough to overwhelm those engaged with learning at the point of delivery. This book shows that if you consider curriculum from the learner's perspective then it looks profoundly different from any view taken from the mountain top of guidelines and best practice initiatives.

Time and again the accounts given reinforce the notion that at the base of learning is the idea that the learner must have an appropriate problem to solve. Without a problem there is little need to learn anything and instead of being a feeder of facts educators are here encouraged to think of themselves as facilitator and mentor. Deliverers of learning thereby recede from the role of pedagogue and instead adopt the position of fellow traveller, or provider of learning experiences likely to challenge and engage learners. 



Teacher creativity is espoused throughout the book. At its core is a subtle subtext containing a big philosophical idea: that the learner is the creator and setter of curriculum and that without these having primacy arguably learning itself might become a pallid endeavour indeed. What is being reclaimed then is the power of the teacher and learner together to create the very agenda for learning. All the tools, the systems, the educational strategies, the directives and so on become within this context the resources for learning rather than its bureacratic goal.