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Knowledge Quest on the Web:
March/April 2002

Special full-text reprint with embedded links of the "Homepage" column
"Articulation from School to Society" (p. 9-10)
exclusively on the KQWeb

Articulation from School to Society

Debbie Abilock, Editor

My school's middle and lower school teachers were discussing what they would like students to know and be able to do as they enter middle school and what our lower school can deliver. Without doubt, every educational institution is familiar with this conversation. Whether it is framed within a discussion of standards, accompanies a curriculum mapping process, or results from informal conversations among faculty, this articulation between levels, grades, and institutions is important work.

Such articulation starts with a clear understanding of current practice. Our school has been involved in a multiyear process of curriculum mapping, similar to what Heidi Hayes Jacobs described in a previous issue of Knowledge Quest.1 It as a laborious paper-and-pencil activity, but we now are recording information about what we teach each month into an online database.2 This will make it feasible to locate gaps and repetitions and to identify areas for potential integration. Our database includes fields into which faculty can input the major components of their levels, specialists, and classroom curriculum. There is room for units, projects, concepts, topics, big ideas, and essential questions. Teachers are retrospectively mapping disciplines (science or physical education), themes (the Silk Road, the Shape of Time, Turn-of-the-Century Child, Legacies), skills and habits of mind (multiplication, testing data, questioning, and monitoring one's thinking), and even school programs (service learning or wind ensemble). In the prekindergarten's emergent curriculum, the map can be used as a real-time diary record.

Sitting in this articulation meeting I was conscious of how the receiving institution drives the curriculum of the sending institution. One teacher commented, AIt would be better if they have had scale and proportion when we teach them to use GIS [graphical information systems] software to map our property in fifth grade." "Teach them to hold their pencil correctly..." suggests a first-grade teacher. Or, as our community high schools know, "two years of laboratory science providing fundamental knowledge in at least two of these three disciplines: biology [which includes anatomy, physiology, marine biology, and aquatic biology], chemistry, and physics" are required to matriculate into the University of California system.3 Don't misinterpret me; there's nothing wrong with requirements. They are goals to work toward as we design backwards. However, this design process must be tempered by sensitivity to a child's developmental readiness and taught with an understanding of an individual's profile of intelligences and learning style.

I would like to propose that we school librarians who look across all the grades have a role in speaking from an even larger perspective. We can articulate the goals of our society within our schools. We should be asking our schools, "Are there essential elements that young citizens should develop as they move toward full participation in a democratic society?"

First I would suggest our society needs citizens who are literate. The twenty-first century demands that readers analyze, compare, evaluate, and interpret multiple representations -- including texts, photographs, artwork, and data -- from a variety of disciplines in order to make fundamental sense of ideas and communicate articulately. In Intelligence Reframed, Howard Gardner contends that "literacies, skills, and disciplines ought to be pursued as tools that allow us to enhance our understanding of important questions, topics, and themes."4 Thus, such reading processes as information literacy, visual literacy, scientific literacy, media literacy, and cultural literacy ought to be our basics.5

Educators must learn to understand--then learn to teach--these literacies in multiple formats. For the school library media specialist (SLMS) this involves learning the complexity of reading new media formats as well as how different cultures define literacy, and how reading multiple texts plays out in classroom practice or in social practice under new technological conditions.6 If you have any doubts about the challenges this presents, try reading David Reinking's "Me and My Hypertext:) A Multiple Digression Analysis of Technology and Literacy [sic]."7  SLMSs should be teaching these literacies.

Second, our society needs citizens who are thinkers. Each of us may define thinking differently: as a balance of analytical, creative, and practical abilities; as intellectual habits like open-mindedness; or as mental processes specific to a discipline.8 Whatever the definition, all our citizens should be able to identify what Ron Powers terms "eyewitless news" and understand the distortions of television=s manufactured news recreations in order to vote intelligently.9

As a corollary, our citizens will be required to make smart choices. In studies of choice making, two social psychologists, Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, have shown that when the number of alternatives becomes too large and the differences between them are small, people become overwhelmed and frustrated. (Sound like Internet search results?) In related studies, Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore College psychology professor, has identified two types of choice makers: "maximizers," who want to find the very best option, even when there is an extensive array of choices; and "satisficers," who look for any choice that meets a set of criteria.10 (Sound like an Internet evaluation strategy?) Students must learn to use the appropriate choice-making behavior in different situations. Thus, school librarians need to teach thinking skills and strategic behavior.

Last, citizens must know how to apply democratic principles. The First Amendment cannot be just book learning; students must make concrete use of it in their daily lives. To begin negotiating the curriculum, review your book selection and Internet acceptable use policies with students and introduce the online resources of the Office of Intellectual Freedom.11 Discuss interpretations of the First Amendment that affect their lives.12 Familiarize yourself with government information on the Internet and the primary functions and current political issues that federal agencies face so that you can help design curricula that move beyond learning how a bill becomes a law. Learn how other educators have used critical literacy to construct a climate of social justice.13 With a functional understanding of their inalienable rights and the rights of every other citizen, and of government's role to protect those rights, students can champion the marketplace of ideas -- the core of our library services.

References and Notes

1. Heidi Hayes Jacobs, "Upgrading the K-12 Journey through Curriculum Mapping: A Technology Tool for Classroom Teachers, Media Specialists, and Administrators," Knowledge Quest 29, no 2. (Nov./Dec. 2000): 25, 28-29.
2. Damon Abilock and Debbie Abilock, NoodleTools Curriculum Mapper, www.noodletools.com/mapper/info.html. Accessed 27 Jan. 2002.
3. UC Gateways, Path to College, 2002, <www1.ucgateways.org/PathToCollege.cfm>. Accessed 27 Jan. 2002.
4. Howard Gardner, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
5. North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 21st Century Skills: An In-depth Look at the 21st Century Skills, <www.ncrel.org/engauge/skills/indepth.htm>. Accessed 27 Jan. 2002.
6. Dennis Adams and Mary Hamm, Literacy in a Multimedia Age (Norwood, Mass.: Christopher-Gordon, 2001); Jim Burke, Illuminating Texts: How to Teach Students to Read the World (Portsmouth, N.H., Heinemann, 2001); Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, New Technologies, Social Practices, and the Challenge of Mindsets, AERA, 2 Apr. 2001, www.geocities.com/c.lankshear/mindsets.html. Accessed 27 Jan. 2002.
7. David Reinking, "Me and My Hypertext:) A Multiple Digression Analysis of Technology and Literacy," Reading Online, May 1997. www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=hypertext/index.html. Accessed 27 Jan. 2002.
8. Robert J. Sternberg and Elena L. Grigorenko, Teaching for Successful Intelligence: To Increase Student Learning and Achievement (Arlington Heights, Ill.: SkyLight Professional Development, 2000); Deborah Meier, "Making Democracy Immediate and Visible," <www.ncrel.org/cscd/pubs/lead41/41visibl.htm>. Accessed 27 Jan. 2002. Howard Gardner, "Howard Gardner, Unfiltered," Policy Review, no. 99 (Feb./Mar. 2000), <www.policyreview.org/feb00/vs.html>. Accessed 27 Jan. 2002.
9. W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 2001), 33; Neil Postman and Steve Powers, How to Watch TV News (New York: Penguin, 1992), 97-114.
10. Erica Goode, "In Weird Math of Choices, 6 Choices Can Beat 600," The New York Times, Jan. 9, 2001, D7.
11. Carole Edelsky, ed., Making Justice Our Project: Teachers Working Toward Critical Whole Language Practice (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1999), 3-4; Office of Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association, www.ala.org/alaorg/oif/. Accessed 27 Jan. 2002.
12. Freedom Forum, Youth Guide to the First Amendment, <www.gaymonterey.com/youth_guide_to_the_first_amendme.htm>. Accessed 27 Jan. 2002.
13. Greg R. Notess, Government Information on the Internet 2000, 3d ed. (Lanham, Md.: Bernan Pr., 2000); Peter Hernon, Robert E. Dugan, and John A. Shuler, U.S. Government on the Web, 2d ed. (Englewood, Colo.: 2001); Kelle S. Sisung, ed., Federal Agency Profiles for Students (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 1999); William Ayers, Jean Ann Hunt, and Therese Quinn, Teaching for Social Justice: A Democracy and Education Reader (New York: Teachers College Pr., 1998); Randy Bomer and Katherine Bomer, For a Better World: Reading and Writing for Social Action (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001).

Debbie Abilock, Editor, is the Assistant Head of The San Francisco School, San Francisco CA.

Copyright © 2002 American Association of School Librarians,a division of the American Library Association.