Canned Curriculum: Ditch it. The Creative is You.

I have a real distaste for canned curriculum. The memories of being forced to follow a pacing guide, being reprimanded if I wasn’t on the same page as the other teachers, making photocopies of worksheets, and being bored out of my mind while I read a script to my students… it sends shivers down my spine. I did not spend precious years of my life engaged in deeply understanding the world and its complexities to be told by a set of unknown individuals working at a corporate firm what to teach and how to teach it. Canned curriculum is the marker of a society that gave up and gave in to mediocrity.

Our Collective Responsibility

I’m a believer that a holistic, culturally responsive, arts-centered, liberatory education is our collective responsibility as educators. We owe it to the future to rethink who we are, what content we deliver and our methodology to meet learning goals. Canned curriculum is devoid of the ingredients for a holistic, culturally responsive, arts-centered, liberatory education.

We deny our students access to the range of their minds and full selves when we rely on biased lessons that center a white dominant narrative, when we ignore who they are, when we ignore what neuroscience and cognitive science tell us about how we learn, and when we allow established “teach to the test” norms to dictate…