Learning in Playful Environments

Writing curriculum is a adventure story all of its own. By Alfred Henry Miles (1848-1929) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons I wrote in November about the power of seeing curriculum as dialectical rather than as a linear narrative . In essence, the argument was that student learning is more effective when curriculum content* is constructed through an ongoing conversation between teachers and the curriculum authority rather than being mandated by a set of commandments from on high. The agency this gives teachers translates into agency for students. When curriculum is based on an understanding that 'the mystery of discourse is not order, but disorder, incoherence, the possibility of the unthinkable,' to quote the sociologist Basil Bernstein ( Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity p. 11 ), then teaching and learning can be truly empowering; students can be prepared for a world where they have the agency to change the defining discourses rather than being controlled by them....