The health teacher was lecturing about the circulatory system, drawing red arteries and blue veins on an overhead. She explained that the arteries carried oxygen-rich blood out from the heart and lungs and that the veins carried oxygen-poor blood back. She wrote out the names of various blood vessels, large and small. After her description of the whole system, a student raised her hand and asked, “So is there something wrong with the blue blood?” The teacher answered that the blue blood needed more oxygen; it was on its way back to the lungs to get it.
The teacher continued to lecture, taking a few other questions. Then the same student raised her hand again. “The blue blood is bad blood, right?” The teacher replied that it was not really bad blood, it was just “deoxygenated,” and she went back to her lecture. Observing from the back of the classroom, I thought that the student still looked puzzled.
After class, I approached the student and said, “It sounds like you're really interested in why the blood turns blue.” She immediately pulled up her shirt sleeve and showed me her inner arm. “See? I have all of these blue veins. And I have sickle-cell, and I want to know if that's the bad blood.”
The student's words bowled me over. She had sickle-cell anemia. She wanted to understand more about her own blood.
From a certain perspective, there is nothing personal about the circulatory system—it is completely standard, academic material, easily abstracted into overhead projections of blue and red ink. But for this student, the circulatory system was not standard, academic, or abstract. She longed to know more.
This student was doing what all students ultimately would like to do with the material they study. She wanted to find a way to connect school material to the questions she cared about most. But in a classroom that didn't encourage connecting subject matter to life, the student did not know how to formulate her question clearly. The teacher, having answered the student's question in a factual way, seemed unaware that what she was teaching—if she could link it to students' deeper questions—might touch them, help them, give them power to understand and to act.
Curiosity at the Core of Curriculum
All too often, curriculum planning focuses on teaching inventories of facts. But when designing curriculum, it's helpful to step back and ask how human beings have acquired the knowledge that we now want to transmit. Why do we know so much, for example, about the inner workings of the body? I would argue that we know as much as we do about the body because many human beings, in many cultures, over time, have been gripped with a need to know. They have asked, “What makes this body of mine work? What can I do to keep my body healthy and strong?” Important, intrinsically fascinating questions such as these, questions about our existence and how we should act, have driven the human acquisition of knowledge in all of the disciplines. Every subject we teach would become more engaging if we considered how it links to the questions that human beings perennially ask and then structured learning around these questions.
As it stands, questions rarely drive our curriculum—but we can change that. I have worked with many teachers who have created courses or units around what we at the Coalition of Essential Schools refer to as essential moral questions or provocative propositions (for more on these terms, see Onosko and Swensen, 1996). Such courses do not require a trade-off between substance and student interest. Students pursue content in the context of questions that matter.
Essential Moral Questions and Provocative Propositions
“Truth does not serve our needs.” So proposed the chalkboard in Bill Ouellette's classroom at Thornton Academy in Saco, Maine, as his 11th grade English students entered the room at the start of a new unit. Bill had his students respond to this statement in a few minutes of writing in their journals and then in small-group conversations. All of them, at some point in their lives, had grappled with whether or not to tell the truth, how much of the truth to tell, to whom, and when. Some of them might have been a bit surprised to discover that this proposition would escape the lips of a teacher—even for purposes of discussion. Many of them were intrigued to discover that the issue of truth was a key concern of some of the great literature they were slated to read.
Bill, in fact, credited inspiration for his organizing proposition to Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, who says, “I don't want realism. I want magic. . . . I don't tell truth. I tell what ought to be truth.” The proposition also captures essential elements of several of the other works of American literature that Bill planned to teach: Death of a Salesman, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter. Bill presented the proposition as a provocative idea to be explored, first in light of the students' own experience, then in light of the experiences of the characters in the literature, then in the wider world of contemporary life.
Every powerful essential moral question or provocative proposition has the potential to encourage students to reflect deeply on their own lives, on the content matter at hand, and on wider social issues. One of Bill's students wrote, “Dear Mr. Ouellette, thanks for making me think more than I have in any other class.” Another student, reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, commented, “After we wrote about why people lie, I began to ask myself whether this guy was telling the truth.” As this student questioned the veracity of the war stories in the novel, he began to recognize the paradox of truth in fiction. On his own, he asked a central question of the unit's organizing theme: “Are storytellers liars?”
Powerful Antidote to Fragmentation
In a typical secondary school, students trek from one subject to another, with no continuity between classes. But when schools organize the curriculum around essential moral and existential questions, students can make powerful connections between the subject areas, while learning key content in each.
Peter Babb, Janice Chen, and Matt Huxley at Drake High School in San Anselmo, California, are in the process of creating a two-year program for 9th and 10th graders, integrating English, social studies, and biology/chemistry through the investigation of essential moral questions. Their first unit, piloted last spring, asked students to explore the question, “How can we respond to human suffering in ways that promote dignity?”
A multidisciplinary investigation of disease provided a key focus of the unit. Students studied fairly standard biology content, including such topics as cell replication and division, the immune system, and the workings of viruses and other pathogens. They improved their lab skills and their understanding of the scientific method. But as they did their lab work, they kept their social science and humanities hats on, knowing that their aim was to link their scientific understanding of the processes of disease with its social ramifications.
In their English and social studies classes, they explored questions like these: “What is the socioeconomic impact of particular diseases?” “Does society have a responsibility to treat diseases?” “What are our individual roles in disease prevention, containment, and treatment?” Students conducted research projects into the social and medical history of diseases in which they were particularly interested.
How do teachers manage assessment when students have followed their interests, exploring moral and existential questions? When students investigate issues that have implications for their own lives and in the real world, it makes sense to have them create products that will be useful beyond the classroom. For this project, students used their research to create a handbook with vital information about diseases. They wrote essays explaining choices they would make about how to allocate limited resources for the care and treatment of specific diseases.
For the unit finale, students sponsored a daylong seminar on a number of diseases, including AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, asthma, breast cancer, flu, leukemia, and sickle-cell anemia. With other students and adult guests from the community, including those with direct experience of particular diseases, the students facilitated discussions on the diseases and their personal and social impact. Science and society, personal and public came together. The students were fascinated. Comments included: “I thought more about diseases and their effect on the world than I ever would have before,” and “I learned a lot more from this project than I would from any lecture.” Students signed up for the new essential moral questions theme cluster in droves, forcing the teachers to hold a lottery to determine admission for this school year.
A Framework for Designing Units
- Addresses an essential element of the subject matter or subject matters,
- Is immediately provocative to a particular group of students, and
- Cannot be fully addressed immediately, but will be illuminated over time, explored anew in the light of new learning.
Next, imagine a final assessment in which students could exhibit their learning. Then “plan backwards,” putting together sub-questions and case studies that will provide the students with concrete subject matter through which to explore the core issues.
Figure 1 is an outline that uses particular questions, activities, and assessments from a U.S. history course as examples.
Figure 1. U.S. History Course
The Blue Blood Is Bad, Right? - table 1
Course Title | The Conundrums of Democracy |
|---|---|
| Framing Question or Provocative Proposition | Does democracy result in effective, representative, and humane governance? |
| Final Activity/Assessment | Create a dramatization, including a written text, of a particular episode in U.S. history that demonstrates the extent to which democracy does or does not result in effective, representative, or humane governance. |
| Sub-Question 1 and Case Study | Should the public vote on complex policy issues? Case studies on ballot initiatives in one's state. |
| Activities/Assessments for Sub-Question 1 | 1. Create an ad campaign for or against a current ballot initiative. 2. Research the aftermath of previous ballot initiatives, such as California's Proposition 13 or 227. |
| Sub-Question 2 and Case Study | What connections exist between wealth and political power? Case studies on the rise of labor unions and on current campaign finance laws. |
| Activities/Assessments for Sub-Question 2 | 1. Research the funding sources and policy stances of a favorite politician. 2. Conduct an interview with a union representative and research labor history in his or her union. |
The Habit of Asking Moral Questions
Like others who have argued that school should be focused more on developing “habits of mind” than on ingesting particular sets of information (see Sizer, 1992; Meier, 1995), I am arguing that school should be a place to practice the habit of inquiry into moral and existential questions: “What are the implications of what I am learning for my own beliefs and actions?” “How does this material help me understand life and my place in the world?” (see fig. 2). As students at Drake High School and in Bill Ouellette's classroom would attest, asking such questions has the potential to make students care more deeply about school.
Figure 2. Moral and Existential Questions
Moral questions have to do with how human beings should act (or should have acted) in situations that involve the well-being of oneself, of other human beings, of other living things, or of the earth.
Moral questions have to do with how human beings should act (or should have acted) in situations that involve the well-being of oneself, of other human beings, of other living things, or of the earth.
Existential questions inquire into human nature, the mysteries of the universe, and the quality of our physical, spiritual, or emotional existence.
The categories of “moral” and “existential” questions certainly overlap. The following examples give a sense of a range of questions that teachers might use to frame curricular units across literature, social studies, and science classes.
The Blue Blood Is Bad, Right? - table 2
Moral Questions | Existential Questions |
|---|---|
| What, if anything, constitutes a just war? | What forces give rise to cruelty among human beings? |
| How should a society distribute its wealth? | What does it mean to be a “good” human being? |
| Are there scientific discoveries that humans should not pursue? | What do I need to do to promote my own health and happiness? |
| Does democracy result in representative and humane governance? | What gives my life meaning? |
| What is the impact of particular technological innovations on the environment? | How does human life differ from other kinds of life on earth? |
The following classroom anecdote, shared by a colleague, captures the importance of making moral and existential questions central to our curriculum. The teacher was teaching her 1st grade students about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, explaining that the law in Alabama at that time dictated that blacks sit in the back of the bus, whites in the front. A little girl of both European American and Asian American descent suddenly raised her hand and asked, “Where would I have sat?”
To me, the little girl's question is a perfect metaphor for students' efforts to make meaning of what they learn. They start by asking, “Given this information, what more do I know about my life? How do I fit into this picture?”
“Is the blue blood bad?” “Where would I have sat?” These are profound questions to ask, questions that perhaps come easier to elementary school students than to the many high school students who have learned to stop asking. But high school students could learn to ask such questions more frequently, for they are the questions that have animated human beings since the beginning of time. We human beings want to know where we sit in this wrenching, beautiful, awe-inspiring world. School could be a place where, by learning the habit of wrestling with these questions, we begin to make sense of our lives.
