Toward Thoughtful Curriculum: Fostering Discipline-Based Conversation in the English Language Arts Classroom. Report Series 1.10.

The typical approach to curriculum in the English language arts fits well with the traditional, content-centered approach to instruction. Such an approach to curriculum, however, is appropriate to a pedagogy that construes knowledge as fixed and transmittable but inappropriate to a pedagogy that views learning as constructed by the learner rather than inherited intact. The sense of an appropriate domain for conversation is at the center of an ongoing set of studies at the National Research Center on Literature Teaching and Learning. The research focuses on what guides teachers' decisions about curriculum. What is emerging is a view of curriculum as defining a domain for culturally significant conversations into which teachers want students to be able to enter. Four principles of effective curricular conversations are: (1) an effective curriculum must be built around language episodes of high quality; (2) an effective curriculum requires an appropriate breadth of materials to sustain conversation; (3) the parts of an effective curriculum are interrelated; and (4) for a curriculum to be effective, instruction must be geared to helping students enter into the curricular conversation. English language arts educators need to develop new ways to talk about curriculum, ways that will further attempts to implement a constructivist pedagogy rather than frustrate them. (Contains 27 references.) (RS)