Katherine Graff

SOCIAL CURRICULUM Session 3, Page 06, Activity 04

EDUC 5329

M.Ed.T, Secondary, Foreign Languages (Arabic)

ACTFL, NCPTS (North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards)

Content practice test NOT TAKEN

TExES content exam NOT TAKEN

PPR practice test NOT TAKEN

TExES PPR 8-12 NOT TAKEN

The social curriculum is becoming gradually more important as schools become more diverse. Television and the media have become an increasing part of children’s daily lives and present unrealistic views of life that often times confuses children because they cannot distinguish between fact and fiction. Consider this quote from http://www.unl.edu/srs/pdfs/tchgsocc.pdf :

“The media violence that pervades our culture has been linked with

increased levels of negative and aggressive interactions among both children and

adolescents (Paik & Comstock, 1994). Surveys of high school students reveal a

startlingly high proportion who are unaware of effective methods for solving social

conflict (Opotow, 1991).”

The Ideal Curriculum

My ideal social curriculum expects active engagement by the students and teacher to learn information and skills that are vital to the Marine Corps’ and the individual’s success in Iraq and the Middle East. An issue I am having with student engagement is that I am finding more and more frequently my students (average age 18-22) cannot or will not think for themselves; they want the answers handed to them on a platter. Often students are unwilling to work together to accomplish goals in a timely and effective manner. Many of them have not had the opportunity to step outside of a traditional management classroom or have been given the responsibility to conduct their learning. I believe that a lifestyle demanding instant gratification contributes to this factor (everything now is bigger, better, and faster and I want it now!) One of the biggest lessons I try to teach my students is teamwork in goal accomplishment. If they learn to cooperate and engage each other during activities, they learn they are not alone in their struggle to acquire the Arabic Language. They become more confident in their potential and it breaks down the natural resistance of adults against trying something new due to fear of failure or anxiety. Consider this from Charles Twyford:

“The anxiety barrier might explain why older learners, including adolescents like those in Collier's (1987) study, are less successful at school language acquisition than middle-childhood learners. Self-conscious teenagers' fear of failing or looking and sounding foolish may create an affective filter that blocks performance of which they would be capable in a relaxed state.” http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/pubs/classics/focus/02bage.htm

Guidance is the best tool to combat the “I want it now” mentality and aids students in working together and teaching each other. I purposely sit students from different cities, states, regions, or countries together in group format so that they can learn to respect and collaborate effectively with someone that looks, speaks or acts differently from their interpretation of “normal”. This is a part of my hidden curriculum to prepare my students to interact with an ethnicity that they have little or no experience with successfully.

The Formal Curriculum

The formal curriculum we have in our program is based on the Coastal Carolina Community College’s policies and procedures that can be found in the student handbook (http://www.coastal.cc.nc.us/catalogs_schedules_handbooks/Student_Handbook.pdf ). It outlines exactly what is expected of students during the course of the semester/year. The most used portion of the handbook our program uses is the Extensive Absence Policy found on page 34. It states that if a student misses 12.5% of the class, they can be administratively dropped by the instructor. The page also contains student rights to a hearing to be reinstated after an administrative drop. Other sections worth mentioning are the online course policy, the tuition and registration guidelines, graduation requirements, and how to request disability services. Ultimately, considering the specialization of our classes, the final decisions about policies and changes or exceptions are made jointly by the Marine Corps and the college cooperatively. Our building manager also has classroom guidelines, such as field day (cleanup) on Tuesdays. A cleaner environment is much more academically motivational than a messy one! Per the Marine Corps, all students must adhere to Marine Corps customs and courtesies at all times, including maintaining their military uniforms and displaying appropriate social interaction with others of differing ranks.

Enacted Curriculum

The biggest influence on my Enacted Curriculum is the Marine Corps’ unique culture. I talked before about the frequency of racial and ethnic slurs being tossed around, but curse words and lewdness is also a part of their highly disciplined and regimented lifestyle. I do forbid my students any racial or ethnic commentary, but I only ask them to keep the cursing to a minimum. They like to talk about blowing things up and weapons and pirates, and I try not to impede upon their willingness to participate in class discussions, and try to use this as an academic tool rather than fight with them (I had a student that voiced his frustrations during a class discussion about drivers in Iraq that sped through checkpoints when they knew they were supposed to stop and prepare to be searched. To express his frustration he used the phrase “I want to shoot cars with my machine gun at any car that speeds into a checkpoint”. This Marine honestly did not want to mow down random cars with his .50 Machine Gun, but he was using the phrase to illustrate his anger. Here was my reaction: “You expressed anger at Iraqi drivers that do not obey checkpoint procedures and you want to fire a machine gun at any car that speeds into your checkpoint area. Let’s discuss some different ways we can stop a vehicle at a checkpoint using Arabic so that you can maintain calm control over the situation, the driver is aware of what your intentions, and he is aware of what his responsibilities will be during the procedure so that they use of deadly force can be avoided.”). As a former Marine, I am used to this culture, so my relationship with my students is much smoother than the relationships of non-veterans to their Arabic students.

Closure

As you can see, there are many outside factors that influence my social curriculum and many different entities that have rules that my students and I must follow. I try to keep up with current social norms (MTV, for example) and military news so that I can get to know my students better and build a strong, successful relationship with them. For further investigation on what others were doing in terms of supporting a healthy social curriculum, I found this website interesting:

http://www.ngfs.org/socialcurr.htm

This website is by the New Garden Friends School in Greensboro, NC. They have published their social curriculum online for parents to view.