Engaging Children in Collective Curriculum Design

Abstract

In this chapter, we investigate how 5-year-old children in Brazil and their teachers collectively design science curriculum. More specifically, we develop an agency|structure dialectic as a framework to describe this collective praxis in which science curriculum may emerge as the result of children-teacher transactions rather than as a result of being predetermined and controlled by the latter. We draw on a cultural-historical approach and on the theory of structure and agency to analyze the events showing the complexity of the activity inside a classroom of very young children by science education standards. Data were collected in the context of a science unit in an early childhood education program in Belo Horizonte. Our study suggests that (a) throughout the movement of agency|passivity ∥ schema|resources, one can observe participative thinking, a form of collective consciousness that arises in and from lived experience; (b) learning is a process in which a group is invested in searching for solutions while they create schemas and rearrange resources to evolve a new structure; and (c) the emergent curriculum is a powerful form of praxis that develops children’s participation from early childhood on.KeywordsEarly Childhood EducationScience CurriculumCurriculum DesignPoster BoardCollective PraxisThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.