Page 144 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 6
Comprehensive Approach allowed him to think about his curriculum, “the way you work with students, the moment you offer something, and the requirements you set.” He also explicitly mentioned that identifying learning objectives was an “eye- opener, in the sense of ‘What do I do and why’? Why is an oral exam in Year 5 constructed the way it is? What I have learned above all, through those intended learning objectives, is to also look at the way in which you finish it, which you then call assessment.”
Sarah also mentioned that she really enjoyed thinking about “how you offer the literature lessons, what you offer, and why you offer it.” To her, this insight “made more sense than merely telling students ‘you have to read this’ ... that you don’t do something merely because you have been doing it for the previous ten years.” This point was also emphasised by Doris who argued that she became aware of implied underlying ideas. “We were always more concerned with implementation. But why? Because, in retrospect, I think that if we had really thought about our curriculum, we would never have done this just like that.” Gaining awareness of and insight into the curriculum for Caitlin was more related to explicating her intuition. For her, the Comprehensive Approach enabled her to be more conscious of “the invisible part between a concrete story and how you respond to this story [...] because you are able to specify it.” She furthermore explains that she felt contented that what she had always done was now labelled, which “allows you to see what you are doing instead of doing things haphazardly” (Caitlin).
For Harry and Ysabel, reconsidering their EFL literature curriculum took an introspective direction. Harry explains how he became more aware of the congruence between his intentions and actions in the literature lessons: “It could, of course, be that something does not really work out, that there is a kind of incongruity between what you ask of them and how you behave. That in the way I say and do things in class, I may behave very differently from the assignments I give them. When you are confronted with it, you can also analyse it yourself if you look closely at the things that belong to the different approaches. Then you can determine for yourself whether you think that something of a certain approach happens too much or too little. It may also be that you have a preference for something, which is inevitable. It may be that you find the readers’ response the most essential and that students have freedom and can think divergently. Thinking about this is sensible.”
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