Practicing Carrere
In reading Sofia’s work, I think about the tensions between making a plan and living the plan. On the early September morning when Mr. Krantzman gives Sofia the Cage text, he does not know if it will resonate with her. It may well be a text she sets back on the shelf unviewed or one she abandons after a brief look. Perhaps this text is one Sofia will carry with her for the next few weeks as she attempts to read and reread Cage. Perhaps none or some of these scenarios will be her experience. What matters here is that this brief exchange between the teacher and the Replica Cartier Roadster student opens possibilities for learning while modeling thoughtful conversation and important habits of mind, for alongside the book, these less tangible but nonetheless critical practices have been offered too.
Sustaining interest in poetry is sustaining interest in students living wide-awake lives and, as such, requires curricular routes that one makes alongside students. One could say Mr. Krantzman practices currere (Pinar, 1994; Pinar & Grumet, 1976), Pinar’s and Grumet’s term for a reconceptualization of curriculum as a course of action that advances understanding. Here understanding is temporally conditioned and, as such, occurs alongside lived actions. Externally prescribed curricula, scripted lessons, and packaged classroom materials intended for teachers to use directly as written with students suggest an absence of temporal reality—as if that which was conceived in a different time and place might be wholly applicable to the present moment. Such epic constructs (Bakhtin, 1981) situate teaching and learning as finalizable. Bakhtin explains that “[discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word” (p. 292).
At Mr. Krantzman’s school, teachers had been given a language arts curriculum they did not write, although teachers did write the initial curriculum. “The work the teachers did was thrown out,” he explains. “Instead, the director of curriculum rewrote the document alone and gave that to us.”
Mr. Krantzman describes the official curriculum as a collection of four thematic units of study, one to be taught per marking period that privileged reading and included almost no emphasis on writing, speaking, listening, or viewing. The texts selected by the administrator privileged whiteness and what Mr. Krantzman describes as a naive understanding of genre: I did the best I could initially when I first received the curriculum. I spent a lot of time figuring out how I could teach the units. But when I tried the second unit, I realized that there was a conflict between the Omega Replica Watches ways I understood curriculum to work and the way this curriculum required me to operate. In order to enact this unit the way it was written, I pretty much had to pretend it was September again and instead of picking up the strands of learning that were already in progress, I had to start a new story. This did not work, so I chose surreptitiously to abandon the prescribed units and to bring in my own thinking and text selections.
This straying from the official document was not comfortable but necessary, says Mr. Krantzman. “I don’t like to do things on the sly, but I couldn’t teach what was given. There was no place for the kids inside the curriculum. Everything had been determined.” With the presence of a new director of curriculum, Mr. Krantzman and his colleagues have been able to discuss curriculum revisions and have been encouraged “to live outside the existing document.”
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