Curriculum
Curriculum development revolved around The Curriculum Conference, which consisted of teachers and directors discussing the type of education that would be taught at the freedom schools. The teachers were to write an outline for their curriculum planning. They were told to keep in mind what life was like in Mississippi and the short amount of time that they had to teach the material. The curriculum had to be teacher-friendly and immediately useful to the students, while being based around questions and activities. The primary focus was questions and discussion rather than memorization of facts and dates. Instructions to teachers included:
- In the matter of classroom procedure, questioning is the vital tool. It is meaningless to flood the student with information he cannot understand; questioning is the path to enlightenment... The value of the Freedom Schools will derive mainly from what the teachers are able to elicit from the students in terms of comprehension and expression of their experiences.
Since the curriculum conference brought together citizens of different backgrounds and origins, the final curriculum outline was based around material from different origins and consisted of three different sections.
The three sections of the Freedom School curriculum were the Academic Curriculum, the Citizenship Curriculum, and the Recreational Curriculum. The purpose of these sections was to teach students social change within the school; regional history; black history; how to answer open-ended questions; and the development of academic skills. The Academic Curriculum consisted of reading, writing, and verbal activities that were based on the student’s own experiences. The Citizenship Curriculum was to encourage the students to ask questions about the society. The Recreational Curriculum required the student to be physically active.
In most of the schools, the Citizenship Curriculum focused on two sets of inter-related questions for class discussion:
- Why are we (teachers and students) in Freedom Schools?
- What is the Freedom Movement?
- What alternatives does the Freedom Movement offer us?
- What does the majority culture have that we want?
- What does the majority culture have that we don't want?
- What do we have that we want to keep?
Read more about this topic: Freedom Schools
Famous quotes containing the word curriculum:
“If we focus exclusively on teaching our children to read, write, spell, and count in their first years of life, we turn our homes into extensions of school and turn bringing up a child into an exercise in curriculum development. We should be parents first and teachers of academic skills second.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)