Why Is Dissemination So Difficult

The article “Why Is Dissemination So Difficult? The Nature of Teacher Knowledge and the Spread of Curriculum Reform” by Cheryl J. Craig, is informative and insightful because the author expresses her beliefs about curriculum dissemination from the narrative and perspective of Bernadette Lohle, a veteran teacher involved in a nationally funded curriculum dissemination project at Cochrane Academy School for the Mathematics, Sciences, and Fine Arts in New York. Lohle’s reactions capture tensions concerning how she could “disseminate” her knowledge and participate in the spread of curriculum reform ideas as stipulated in her school’s awarded grant proposal (p.257). According to Craig, teachers are curriculum makers rather than curriculum implementers (Tyler and Schwab, Clandinin and Connelly,1992). I agree with Craig when she states that Lohle’s practice powerfully shows how the technical rational notion of teachers as implementers, a notion that underlies curriculum dissemination and program replication and drives educational policy, needs to be seriously challenged, along with what is at stake when an ideologically driven focus on test scores and the expediency of “teaching to the test” overtakes artful and artistic teaching and learning as a local, state, and national priority (p.34).
Craig …show more content…
Clandinin and Connelly (1992) argued that, rather than being curriculum implementers as commonly conceived, teachers are curriculum makers. From this perspective, “teachers and students live out a curriculum in which an account of teachers’ and students’ lives over time is the curriculum, although intentionality, objectives, and curriculum materials do play a part of it” (p. 365). I found this information pivotal to Criag’s research because it leads to her investigation of Bernadette Lohle’s curriculum