Diversity Highlights

Dr. David L. Griffin's weekly thoughts imparting diversity issues pertaining to students, faculty and staff in the College of Education

April 28, 2008

Promoting Learning by Broadening Curricular Content
The curricular content has a tremendous effect on the amount of effort students expend on learning and on the overall interest many express for school. Although some students consider tradition curricular contact to be both stimulating and challenging, many characterize it as monotonous and boring. Those students who find themselves under- stimulated by the traditional curriculum respond in various manners. For example, children in elementary grades may engage in off-task behaviors and become a disruptive element in the learning environment. Conversely, some middle and high school youths may make superficial connections with content, whereas others may simply be unable to perceive the relevance of what is being taught.

Persistent gaps between curricular content and students’ interest, knowledge, and cultural worldviews can result in classroom experiences defined by extended episodes of learning interference and academic disconnection. In such situations, many students compartmentalize their lives in ways that differentiate the time they spend in classrooms from their lives beyond school. For these students, time they spend in classrooms from their lives beyond school. For these students, time spent in classrooms is perceived as “unreality”. The cumulative effect of these experiences can cause them to lose interest in school. Over time, their academic self-concepts suffer, and the students underachieve or fail outright because they cannot make the necessary connections with the curricular content. Scholars who have studied this phenomenon contend that one way caring, competent teachers can improve school experiences for these students is by broadening the focus on the curriculum to make it more culturally familiar to the students. These teachers learned that content integration and knowledge construction are important issues to consider when teaching culturally diverse student populations. Through content integration, teachers identify and incorporate material into the curriculum that represents diverse perspectives. By doing so, teachers make the overall learning experience more relevant to a wider range of the student population. At the same time, knowledge construction allows teachers to provide all students with more critically comprehensive learning experiences by exploring worldviews and assumptions reflected in curricular content. Thus, in the process of broadening the curriculum, teachers must evaluate and augment the content they teach vis-à-vis the needs and interests of their students. A place to begin this process is with critical analysis of common teaching resources such as commercial textbooks.

From Cultural Diversity In Our Schools by Patricia L. Marshall