Fairies on the schoolyard: curriculum as inclusive conversation

ABSTRACT

What does it mean for curriculum to be inclusive? This paper builds upon assertions that standardised, pre-determined curriculum marginalises students. This is especially harmful for students labelled with disabilities. I argue for an alternative approach to curriculum that is more fluid and inclusive than the traditional model. Describing this approach, I call on the image of a conversation: a discourse influenced by everyone, informal, and easily responsive to constant redirection. Where this model is applicable to all students, curriculum as conversation is especially needed for students labelled with disabilities. In the first part of this paper, I provide an argument for why inclusive curriculum is beneficial for everyone and flesh out the notion of conversation. In the second half, I look at how teachers in the long-term teacher inquiry group, the Brookline Teacher Research Seminar (BTRS) successfully treated curriculum as a conversation to include their students. I demonstrate how the writings of these teachers offer an extremely helpful opus of counter-narratives on inclusive conversational curricula.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• inclusion
• narrative
• conversation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I focus on policy initiatives and teachers from the United States though my arguments are applicable to places where a call for inclusion is belied by mandated and pre-determined curriculum.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cara Furman

Cara Furman is a professor of early childhood education at the University of Maine Farmington. Prior to this, she was an urban public elementary school teacher. Her research focuses on Descriptive Inquiry, inquiry, asset based inclusive teaching, and progressive practices. Having studied both philosophy and education, she integrates qualitative research on classroom practice, teacher research, and philosophy in both her teaching and research. She is the co-director of the Summer Institute on Descriptive Inquiry.