Powerful truths can often be best understood and conveyed through fables or stories. Aesop told the story of the fox who could not reach some grapes - so concluded they were probably sour. When we say ‘sour grapes’ after someone criticises something they do not have, a complex set of meanings is invoked.
I often use stories to both express and construct my understanding. One of the most useful stories when it comes to learning goals and curriculum, comes from the story of the Ethiopian prince Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson. Here is how I would explain it.
In the story of Rasselas, an astronomer, is given a mighty office to monitor the night sky and the weather for the king. He begins to write down and track the movement of the planets and moon. He begins to feel that by writing them down everyday he must be controlling them. His belief hardens that if he stops writing them down, then they will stop happening - so he cannot now stop. He no longer trusts that they happened naturally without his help previously.
Milton Erickson, hypnotists and story telling experts will tell you that if you try to explain a metaphorical story too much, you strip it of most of its richness. As Isadore Duncan said when asked what her dancing meant ‘if I could explain it in words, I wouldn’t have to dance’.
But nonetheless, if it is not already obvious, let me explain why this story is so helpful to me when thinking about writing curriculum or helping others to do so.
‘Children can count to 20’… ‘Identify initial sounds’… ‘Identify the relative signficance of an historical event’… Curricula often have hundreds of these statements. I remember working on a science curriculum with 620 of these to be covered in a year and half. Because of course, as curriculum writers if you do not write it down, it doesn’t happen, right?
I remember talking with someone who had spent a vast amount of time articulating all the discrete knowledge and skill that fell under a conceptual understanding. So for example ‘Learners understand that authorial voice is not identical to narrative voice’, would need to be ‘unpacked’ by the curriculum writer into ‘learners understand the complexities of authorial intent’, ‘learners can understand the concept of irony’, ‘learners can distinguish meta-narrative from narrative’, ‘learners can identify tone and mood from narrative text’ ad infinitum.
I tried to help by suggesting that just the understanding itself would do, and then maybe illustrate some examples of what that might look like, but ultimately the rest will either happen naturally as it always has, or the teacher will percieve which knowledge or skills are missing for a specific learner and intervene. But you do not need to write it all down in advance in order for the learning to happen. That can happen in the classroom. The learning goal can be a navigation tool, not a 1-1 map of everything you think the learner will learn. And remember - people learned to do this before the idea of curriculum writing or learning goals existed.
Teachers knowing their craft and subject deeply is invaluable. I am not arguing for sloppy teaching and a lack of intentionality. Teachers being able to identify ‘Ah, they don’t get irony, ok, I can help with that’ is essential. But becoming the astronomer who believes only what they write down happens; it only happens if they write it down; and therefore they must write down everything, is a catastrophic failure of strategy we see all too often.
In an age of curriculum overload, which has got so bad that the OECD has written this report to help countries undo the vast over complication of their curricula, Rasselas, prince of Ethiopia might just have a useful story to tell.