The Incompleteness of Standards and the Potential of/for Deliberative Discourse (original) (raw)

2019, Journal of curriculum theorizing

The development of curriculum, lesson plans, formative and summative assessments, and government education policy circle around the high expectations and rigor of academic standards. Whether considered from the vantage point of college and career readiness or disciplinary content knowledge, academic standards provide a content that directs schooling, if not education. How we understand academic standards indicates a great deal about how we relate to and embody education. What occurs in school and individual classrooms is shaped by the relationship we form with academic standards. In many cases, we are tempted to approach academic standards as objects of inquiry and implementation and not as subjects of intention in dialogue. It is common to see academic standards as an object of study or as a set of restraining requirements for the development of curricula, discrete lesson plans, and assessment instruments. The consequence of not considering academic standards as subjects of intention, defined by our purpose in relation to them, is serious. Approaching academic standards from an orientation that appreciates their role as contextual actors has significant potential to transform education, schooling, the development of curriculum, and classroom instructional practices. If we maintain a division between the products or objects of academic standards and our purpose in creating curricula and educative experiences within a schooling context, then the culture will develop immanently, in ways that are unpredictable (Hirschkop, 1989). If we take a phenomenological approach to our study of academic standards, we may develop a mode of discourse that will convey the normative, value-laden connection between the lessons, curriculum, and assessments, and the standards as intentional subjects. As Greg Nielsen's (2002) analysis of Mikhail Bakhtin helps to demonstrate, the answerability (Bakhtin, 1993) of our action in relation to academic standards is potentially critical: The accumulation of each individual act makes up my life history, my once-occurent-life. "To be in life, to be actually, is to act, is to be unindifferent toward the once-occurentwhole" (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 43). If I am indifferent toward the once-occurent-whole, or if I am pretending to be someone I am not, then the fact of my uniqueness and answerability are severely jeopardized. In fact, if I ignore my active self and simply live the passive self A