Symbolic interactionism and curriculum design.

Mike Wesch, Cathy Davidson, and Randy Bass this week provided some answers to the question of why we need a why in curriculum design, pointing out that usually when we design our courses we start with the what and the how, and the why is an afterthought, if thought about at all. After the hangout we were asked “So what is the real “why” of your course? Why should students take it? How will they be changed by it?”

I start course design with a big idea (borrowed from a fellow workshop participant some years ago – if it was you remind me and I’ll credit you), which is one way of engaging with the why. For FMCS2100 Music and Culture the big idea is Music Matters. The challenge for course design is to create an environment in which all students will at some point come to a realization that music matters, without my ever having told them that.

Randy Bass argues that the tradition self-contained courses is primarily a management tool, and that we need to design courses that extend learning “to life experience, to other courses, or to larger communities of practice” (2012).

“If we are beginning to see that the greatest impact on learning is in these boundary-crossing, integrative, and socially networked experiences, then we need to re-create dimensions of these experiences in the learning designs that bridge the classroom with life outside of it” (Bass 2012).

Cash (an Australian Cattle Dog) has this week passed his third course, opening up the world of post-graduate jobs and games. I picked up two things from dog school that are relevant to teaching in the B.A.: first that there is little point in knowledge and skills that only have application in the classroom, learning has to be connected to life; second, that symbolic interactionism is a learning theory for lifelong education. Relationship-based dog training is based in symbolic interactionism: we acquire meanings through social interaction. This has been the basis for my teaching, learning through interactions with others.

This idea is also at the core of the Slow Education movement, a response in part to the increasingly content and competencies driven approach to learning.  Slow Education sees relationships as being at the heart of learning, relationships with fellow students, designated experts, family and friends and the wider community. Slow Education is based in accepting the messiness and inefficiencies of learning, as learners construct their own meanings through social engagement.

In my first class with first year students I often ask them to take off their jumpers, and ask those who pulled it off from the hem, inside out to stand, while those who pulled it off from the collar, right-way out, remain seated. Students are generally stunned to realise that somewhere along the way they have learned the gendered rule for removing jumpers.

So why should students take my course? Because they will be changed by it. We will make the familiar strange, and build new meanings through social engagement