Chapter 5 "Curriculum as a Framework for Discovery"

Kutz, Groden, and Zamel conceptualize curriculum as an environment for learning. By not looking at curriculum as a set text or agenda, we are able, as teachers, to create learning environments focused on discovery, both for students and ourselves! Set curriculum can limit teachers own engagement with learning, removing the focus from thinking about and incorporating critical pedagogy to the trap of traditional classroom composition lessons. But, just as students benefit from a Socratic and inquisitive approach to learning, teachers profit from constant questioning, assessment, and reconfiguration of their own pedagogical practices.

As such, Kutz, Groden, and Zamel have redefined composition curriculum into a framework for discovery. Language does not develop thinking; rather, meta-cognition and critical thinking about language--that creates meaning through language--develops students' ability and accuracy in language use. Composition becomes the means for communication. Our curriculum goals are no longer a necessarily flaw-free compositions, but compositions that communicate meaning. 

This concept of curriculum allows for interaction between teachers and students in the pursuit and creation of new knowledge through communication. Both teachers and students are transformed by collaborative learning. Our language becomes the means for learning, not just a set curriculum of what one "should" know. Destroying the concept of curriculum as guidelines allows teachers and students to create social, dialectical communities, posing problems and discovering solutions to the questions that are meaningful to their lives and interests. 

These environments include:

• exposure to a variety of language forms in a structured (but not static) environment
• topics that allow students to construct meaningful knowledge
• interdisciplinary practices and concerns
• multicultural content as validation for students' diverse backgrounds
• strong connections to the real world, when the work done in class holds purchase in students' lives, and the students' experiences bring new ideas into the classroom