TE 818 Introduction

My name is Shanna Robinson and I am a fortyish year old Social Studies educator born and raised in Lansing, Michigan.  I am a proud product of the Lansing School District and my mother has been a history teacher for over forty years. In my family, we have an adage,  “History is in our nature,” so much so, that my nieces and nephews, while not my mother’s biological relatives, even say so.  For me, however, History IS in my nature; learned through osmosis in the womb and ingrained in my DNA.  Social studies, history is just so natural to me that I remember not even studying and just knowing the answers.

Concurrently, I have never wanted to be anything except an educator.  Again, this is thanks to my mother and the days before digital or electronic grading.  When I learned my alphabet and could distinguish the letters from one another, my mother would have me grade papers (maybe that’s why I hate it now!)  I was a frequent visitor at Everett High School and spent so much time in the classroom that do to anything else with my life would be an anathema.  

Since history is such a large part of who and what I am, part of my personal interests have to do with history – or rather learning in general.  My father was once told me that “stupidity in a woman is unfeminine” and to that end I like to be knowledgeable on a variety of subjects.  Literally, as I type this, I am fulfilling one of my life’s goals, which was to visit every six inhabitable continent.  I have wanted to visit Africa for three years and now, I am stuck in the mud on safari and finishing up my homework.  It’s a beautiful space to be in, but only I could end up stuck in a broken down van in the middle of the Maasai Mara Nature Reserve in Kenya.

Professionally, I would eventually like to earn my doctorate in either History or Social Studies education.  I have long held that my true niche is probably as the director of the Teaching American History grant or a museum docent; something where I can educate the masses in a more creative and unique way.  Not that I don’t love teaching, but there is a difference when you are teaching a group of educators or in charge of museum educational outreach to high schools.  It’s something to think about at least.  

So, to answer the essential question, “What is Curriculum?”  I don’t want to cheat, so I purposely did not look anything up on the Internet.  I wanted to put my own ideas out there first and then let the course guide me to the answer.  But, technically, it is a framework that is used to guide the teaching of a course.  What the students are expected to learn and what the teachers are expected to teach.   The inclusion or exclusion of content found within those standards can be socially, politically, and culturally motivated, but nonetheless, it is a requirement that those specific content standards be taught.  It is also something I’ve learned that I am almost uncompromising with.  Since I live in China, I have had to make subtle adjustments to how I teach and view curriculum.  I have found myself to be more sympathetic to the ideals of the West and less compromising to what I view as necessary education, since so much of it is trying to be suppressed by the authorities and those in charge.