The author relates the story of an exercise in curriculum-making that took place at The School at Columbia University as 4th graders responded to the erection of The Gates in New York's Central Park in the winter of 2005, a unique installation of conceptual art by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The development of these responses over several weeks surreptitiously afforded each participant in this curriculum experience the opportunity to conceptualize certain methods and meanings most salient to them. This article opens a creative space for reconsidering some notions on what constitutes exemplary content, curricula, and criteria for assessment in art education by drawing upon the metaphor of gateways and the re-search of children.Who Is At The City Gates? Sometimes it is better not to meet a problem head on. Richard S. Prawat (1999) described a problem that has vexed educators and learning theorists for years, a problem that has been termed the learning paradox. The paradox attempts to address how it is that new and more sophisticated knowledge might be fashioned out of prior, less complex knowledge. In response, educators have commonly sought to design curriculum enterprises as if they were efficient and plumb lined architectural structures, evident in the language that asks teachers to develop "the conceptual foundations to frame and shape curriculum content and to align instruction and assessment tasks" (Stewart & Walker, 2005, p. 18). As it happens, I was a student of architecture long before I was a Who Is At The City Gates? 5 student of the visual arts and it was apparent to me that contemporary architectural practice tailored itself after a formalist and scientific model situated within the modernist paradigm of progress. A curriculum architecture seeks the best solution to fashioning more sophisticated learning in the same purportedly inevitable way that "form follows function" in nature, a dictum popularized by American architect Louis Sullivan (1956).
Architectural ConstraintsArchitecture is a praxis that determines its final design from the convergence of known quality constraints: building usage specifications; structural safety standards;plumbing, electrical, and HVAC mechanical demands; available building materials;recorded property boundaries; client needs and proclivities; budget limitations; sitespecific water tables and geological implications; neighborhood contextual fit; general cultural norms; building code requirements; labor costs; construction time windows; city and local zoning ordinances; labor union and general contracting agreements-even regional weather phenomena. The specificities addressed by an architectural design have given rise to the metaphors hidden in the notions of "building a curriculum architecture"and "providing a scaffolding for learning." This remains evident in the glossary of one of the books in the recent Understanding by Design curriculum planning series, where the authors define curriculum as an effort to meet each and every "standard," or quality ...
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