Community-Based Curriculum
In order to understand the community-based curriculum, one needs to understand what it meant by the term "curriculum." In Pedagogy in the Age of Politics: Writing and Reading (in) the Academy, David Bleich discusses different definitions of the term curriculum in his essay "The 'Kinds of Language' Curriculum." He explains that, in the academy, "it is a term most often used to describe departments of teacher education in schools of education: Curriculum and Instruction departments" (196). He further states:
"Curriculum" if used to describe what is taught in the university, would be considered to have devalued the status, the freedom, the depth, and the subtlety of the study that takes place there. The university is the site of research, reflection, speculation, and perhaps training. So one use of this term "curriculum" depends on a contrast between the alleged fixed status of college subject matters. (196)
The problems associated with this type of definition is that curriculum is perpetuated as a hierarchical term. Many English professors accept the term and its implications because it is what non-English disciplines use to express the necessary training involved in teaching students how to write academic essays within the required first year composition course.
With my project, I propose that English professors reclaim the curriculum and define it to fit the new collaborative learning that will replace the department hierarchy. In Beyond English, Inc., the foreword describes what is meant by the authors when they discuss the changing of the curriculum:
The term "curriculum" outside professional circles means "subject matter." The contributions to this book attempt to change the scope, reference, teaching, and scholarship of our subject matter, whose name...would do well to add to English the terms "language" or "language use." (xi)
In my research, I would support the definition of curriculum as defined by the authors of Beyond English, Inc. and would support an encouragement and focus on community building between department professors as well as students. One theoretical framework that could be used to break the traditional boundaries of research, teaching, and learning within a global society would be community-based ethnography. With an emphasis on qualitative research methods, community building and action research is possible.
In order for such a method to succeed, the community must first be established within the department. One manner in which professors can create this community is through sharing autobiographical teaching stories. Rhonda C. Grego suggests this possibility in her essay "Writing Academic Autobiographies," located in Pedagogy in the Age of Politics: Writing and Reading (in) the Academy. She explains:
When we help our colleagues reexperience (relive) their writing processes, when they recall intuitions and common writing experiences from their pasts, we begin to tear down walls between what is counted as valuable, "intellectual," and influential experience (or "knowledge") in the academy and what is not. (217)
These concepts are further discussed in the sections: