Probing the Boundaries of Curriculum: Lessons from Out-of-School Activities.

Two secondary out-of-school activities were evaluated to determine how well each met rigorous definitions of curriculum. It was found that the activities--a whitewater canoe trip and a series of 3 10-day expeditions to a boreal forest, a subarctic area, and a mountain setting--both met the criteria for curriculum including intent of the teacher to teach and of the student to learn, sustained application, ordered content, and seriousness attributed to the enterprise by the participants. However, the canoe trip is treated as noncurriculum by the school while the expeditions are treated as a proper part of the curriculum and called by a regular school subject title, Environmental Biology. If it strains the concept of curriculum too much to include activities having the attributes ascribed to education, but outside the recognized subject boundaries, then another conceptualization is needed to reflect the valuable impact that these activities have on the participants. The current practice of defining all such school activities negatively as noncurriculum fails to do them justice. The notion of curriculum needs to include educating activities that transcend the subjects and the school boundaries but otherwise meet rigorous criteria of education. (JHZ)